Boundless

by Carolyn Dawn Flynn

When you have become no one, how do you become someone again?

Carolyn Dawn Flynn thought she had the answer. As an author, magazine journalist, and single mother of twins, she was sure of her path. But with her twins eagerly casting their college choices to anywhere-but-here, and the newspaper industry in a death spiral, her life was on a collision course with an uncertain future. Clearly, it was time for a road trip.

Flynn takes a media job two thousand miles away, dismantles the twins’ childhood home, and bids a (merciful!) farewell to the mom-van. She moves from the high desert mesa of New Mexico to the healing waters of Saratoga Springs, New York. Within weeks, the dream unravels, leaving Flynn searching for a way to find home—or perhaps create a new home entirely.

In BOUNDLESS, Flynn reimagines the empty nest, turning her keen insight and signature poetic voice to the deeper questions about the stages of women’s lives. Set at the intersection of youthful coming-of-age and the vanishing horizon of middle age, BOUNDLESS offers powerful questions about what it means to become—and ultimately provides a road map for recovering emotional agility.

332 pages, Kindle Edition

Published December 21, 2024

Reviews

[Polly Hansen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Flynn is a mystic and poet with lush descriptions on every page and a lyrical way of looking at the world. For example, “I struggled to take it in, this not-yet-spring scene in a rose Garden, its lushness curtailed, brown serrated leaves of hybrids and floribundas and heirloom roses drooping in the rain, marble statues, rust stained and barely breathing beneath the glass, their gleaming smooth skin dulled by gray sky that refused to let in any light. Standing before their cages, I watched them looking at me, afraid of what they may say.” And, by turns, Flynn often has a sense of humor: “A coffee house that boasted it still had a Bob Dylan vibe because he'd played there before anyone knew anything about hard rain or Rolling Stones or the complete unknown.”

Boundless is a memoir about empty nesting, which, for any mother, is a rite of passage that really doesn't have any rituals but needs them. I remember when my youngest moved into the dorm I'd already been seeing a therapist for months, preparing myself for this stage of abandonment, because that's what it felt like. My youngest was gone. I know longer had a grown daughter to occupy my lap as she was wont to do even she towered over me. Flynn takes us on that journey and then some, determined to care for her twins as they go off to college while embarking on an adventure of her own, only to meet the unexpected.

How Flynn deals with the unexpected is a journey in itself, taking her, and us, into the depths of despair and ultimately, triumph and reconciliation with life itself.

[Michelle Glogovac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Boundless is a deeply moving memoir that traces Carolyn Flynn’s transition into empty nesting as her twins leave for college—while also examining what it means to be a woman who has spent decades navigating journalism and the corporate world. With honesty and vulnerability, Flynn lays bare the emotional whiplash of this season of life, naming the loneliness, uncertainty, and grief that often go unspoken. What makes this memoir especially powerful is her candor about asking for help—recognizing when she couldn’t carry it alone and choosing connection over silence. Boundless is both a personal reckoning and a reminder that no woman has to navigate reinvention on her own.