Winter Bloom: A Heart Warms in San Miguel

by Patricia Jean Browne

In a well-crafted narrative that deftly weaves present and past, Patricia Jean Browne shares her courageous journey to find her authentic self and experience true intimacy and connection after being in a convention-bound, gender-scripted marriage over forty years. Through life-writing and self-respecting determination, Browne is able to break free of pressures driving her mother’s and grandmother’s generation to hide and deny familial malaise: addictions, domestic abuse, infidelity. Along with Browne, the reader learns the devastating costs for women of traditional marriage and motherhood and the layers of self-deception that are required to repress their realization that life’s true taste is eluding them. Her story will inspire women to open their eyes, un-drug themselves with busyness, and recognize that deep bonding with life partners and children requires self-development. Men will also learn much from this woman’s story.

364 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 24, 2014