Stories That
Transform
Raw, unflinching narratives about survival, resilience, and the wild landscapes that shape us—from award-winning memoir to literary nonfiction that dares to tell the truth.
The Answer is in the Wound: Trauma, Rage, and Alchemy
(Roxane Gay Books, released on August 26th, 2025)
The trauma of surviving an abusive marriage didn't make Kelly Sundberg stronger. In fact, it nearly broke her. Instead of following the neat storyline she expected from her life, she became someone she resented. First learning to coexist with her rage and then turn that rage into strength and power, Sundberg's journey to alchemizing her suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder into post-traumatic growth was neither easy nor simple.
For readers of In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado and The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison, The Answer is in the Wound is a beautiful, devastating, and nuanced examination into embracing a new reality after trauma and finding power and beauty within it.
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Goodbye, Sweet Girl
(Harper Collins, 2018)
In this brave and beautiful memoir, written with the raw honesty and devastating openness of The Glass Castle and The Liar's Club, a woman chronicles how her marriage devolved from a love story into a shocking tale of abuse — examining the tenderness and violence entwined in the relationship, why she endured years of physical and emotional pain, and how she eventually broke free.
Mesmerizing and poetic, Goodbye, Sweet Girl is a harrowing, cautionary, and ultimately redemptive tale that brilliantly illuminates one woman's transformation.
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What People Are Saying
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Other Writings
More writing and publications
Literary Essays
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Anthologized in Best American Essays 2015, this essay explores the emotional see-saw of love and abuse in a marriage.
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An essay about single parenting, loneliness, love, and finding family in the homes we’re given.
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Magic in a tattoo that becomes both armor and a guardian angel.
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Finding joy in cooking after the end of a brutal marriage.
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Two childhood friends; two very different lives lived.
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In a ski resort built like a television set, everyone plays their part, but one woman seeks to break free.
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“I am the fire. I am the poppies.”
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Two women speak about the unspeakable.
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An experimental prose poem about mothering, masculinity, and mystery.
Print Essays
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Red is the witch–burned at the stake. Reed is the sucubus–killing men with their own desires.
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A lyric look at love, betrayal,, and the natural world.
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“This is a story about a woman who went into the wilderness and came out unchanged.”
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Girlhood in rural Idaho can be both beautiful and brutal.
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Two couples at a demolition derby reflect on what it takes to make a marriage work.
Other Writing and Commentary
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Maybe this time, the train won’t go off the tracks. Maybe this time, love will actually work.
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A makeup artist and a writer see the beauty in each other.
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An excerpt from Goodbye, Sweet Girl.
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A lonely, single mother finds community in a local gym.
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“Due process” looks different to survivors than it does to Donald Trump.
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On celebrities who aren’t perfect victims.
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A survivor sees herself in a photo of Amber Heard.
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A response to the notion that a writer needs a spouse to support them financially.
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Yes, yes it can.
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Strategies for negotiating the emotional and physical aspects of memoir writing.
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