Why I wrote a memoir

A couple of years ago, I was scrolling Facebook when a post stopped me. The younger sister of my college best friend shared an Amazon link, asking everyone to buy her older sister’s book. The title, Roses and Rikers, hit me like a jolt.

It was Cindy’s story, the one she never told me.

For years, I skirted around it. When it surfaced in conversation, she’d shrug and change the subject. The sweetest girl you’ll ever meet, this story was about her as a new mother, separated from her newborn, serving time in one of the worst jails in the United States.

I bought the book and read it in a week. I learned about her year in Rikers, all because of one awful night when she tried to get away from an unsafe situation, grabbed her keys after a few drinks, and crashed into the wrong mafia men from the Bronx. Cindy was arrested for drunk driving and sent to Rikers. This darling, beautiful blond girl from small-town Virginia wrote about her naïveté, about her whiteness, about befriending the marginalized Black and Latina women in jail.

I cried. I softened. I laughed through snotty tears. Mostly, I met my friend again. I saw how that crucible changed her, molded her, matured her into someone I never fully knew.

We aren’t as close today as we should be, due to distance, time, and different paths. But her memoir let me see beneath the surface, love who she became, and feel real empathy for what she endured. She would never have told me that in a quick catch-up. Not in that intimate inner voice that only comes out on the page.

That’s what writing does. It shows your insides, the parts you can’t fully reveal on a coffee date. The juicy stuff that only slips out at certain hours when you’re tired or brave or both.

How do you really get to know someone? Read their writing. Read their stories and blog posts and you hear the other voice, the true one. In writing groups, I know people better from their pages than from their small talk. Raw doesn’t just happen on command. Sometimes it pours out at the keyboard. More often it arrives sideways—on a walk, in the pool, in a dream—when the busy brain finally shuts up and the honest brain slides in. When a memoir works, it isn’t just confession. It’s shaped truth.

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I wrote my memoir for a similar reason as my friend: to tell a story I couldn’t tell on one coffee date, or even a late-night heart-to-heart. I wanted to speak my truth. But to find my truth, I needed years to let it out, figure it out, analyze it all, and make it make sense for me so I could share it with you.

Alchemy of a Woman is my memoir that captures a decade of my life’s adventures, organized into a full-length narrative nonfiction. Initially, I thought it would be a rom com, a lighthearted tale about a time when I loved three men at once. But as I poured my heart onto the pages, I realized this story went deeper. It’s about confronting female guilt, Mormon guilt, Jesus guilt, white-saviorism–humanitarian-aid-type guilt. It’s an international journey of learning to listen to my own gut, freeing it from guilt (and parasites) to finally hear it clearly.

I needed to write this. Why? Because I’m a Pisces, and apparently the zodiac gods say I’m supposed to be an emotionally expressive girl. It’s fucking true.

Because I was tired of guilt. Because I learned how to love. Because I lived across cultures and carried contradictions. Because I’m grateful for privilege and furious at inequity. Because I want to use what I have and also ask what it means to have it. Because I have black brothers, brown in-laws, Arab and Russian best friends, indigenous colleagues, a Latino husband, and very white parents, and I know that identity is messy. Because I wanted to tell that truth without a slogan.

As I got to writing it, I realized the purpose of my story: to shake women awake from all that self-punishment. Especially my Utah women, those raised in religion and perfection, women suffocated by shame for their mistakes, their doubts, their humanness. I want them to know they don’t have to crawl through pain to prove compassion. Go live. Travel. Fall in love with people who don’t look like you, sound like you, pray like you. That’s how you learn empathy, not through suffering, but through living fully.

***

After two years of emotional release on my keyboard while swaying and sobbing to Florence + The Machine, then a year of making it make sense, another year of organizing and structuring it with expert guidance, and another year of editing with professionals… it is here.

And somewhere in that process, I understood that this next part needed to stay true to how it began. So I stopped searching for an agent or publisher and decided to self-publish—fully indie, fully me. I want this story to arrive in your hands in my own voice, not one trimmed, softened, or shaped by someone else’s idea of what will sell. It is my story. My path. And this step, bringing it into the world, is part of that path.

(But yeah, if you know a big publisher, hit me up 😉 )

***

So why did I write a memoir?

Because I want you to know me, and not just the surface me. Because I want to pull the subconscious up to daylight and see what it has to say. And because my friend’s Roses and Rikers reminded me what a book can do: let us meet each other in that inner voice, the one that admits fear and failure, the one that chooses love over guilt, the one that believes transformation is possible.

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I’ll be officially launching Alchemy of a Woman at the end of November. You can preorder a signed copy (with a personalized note) here:

www.amandawestfall.com/alchemyofawoman

And if you were curious about my friend’s book, you can buy it on Amazon here.

Me with a different book, as mine isn’t printed yet (but will be in a few weeks!)