Born to Fly: a memoir

Born to Fly is a generational memoir I wrote when I was 28 years old and coming out of a
devastating quarter-life crisis. Facing an uncertain future, I needed to understand what happened to me before and find an anchor to hold me steady going forward. In my search, I kept returning to a single idea: "Remember who you are." The problem was, I didn't know anymore. I knew my mother and grandmother had lived very challenging lives by the time they were my age. Mamie Harvey, my grandmother, is a beer-drinking, tobacco chewing, gun toting force of nature who could fight like a man in her prime, and whose determination saw her family through extreme poverty and years of domestic violence in rural Mississippi. My mother, Ruthie, who was known as Muhammad Ali for a time in her formative years, survived the pangs of hunger and the furor of violence in her childhood home, and as a teen mother, she vowed that her children would have something better.

As I retraced their experiences as well as my own, I discovered an inheritance of strength and survival. My journey of self-realization may inspire you to seek your own "inheritance."