It was the hardest project I’ve ever worked on — and the one I am proudest of. Despite always wanting to write fiction, I let myself change my mind and wrote a memoir about loss, love, and navigating grief. It’s a love letter addressed to my mother, and also a reckoning with her: she died when I was a teenager. She was strong, yet lonely. She was full of love, yet her silences hurt. She was a complex woman fighting for survival in post-communist Romania.

I was her youngest daughter - the one who was there when she got her cancer diagnosis (she pretended otherwise) and also the one who hoped, against all odds, she’d make a recovery until her very last breath.

It wasn’t until I stumbled upon Virginia Woolf’s quote,

“It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole. This wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me.”

that I found the courage to write our story.

Halfway through, I realized I was working on a book - it was more than what I initially thought. I wanted to reach those who lost a parent and let them know that pain turns into longing, that it is OK to ask for help, and that they - and thus, we - are not alone. There are more of us than we think.

Four years later, the book has become a bestseller. More importantly, it has found its way into readers’ hearts. Hundreds have shared their stories with me, thanked me for sharing mine, or told me they fell in love with my mother.

And I have written back to every single one.