The best stories aren’t about uniqueness. Instead, they are about what connects us.

I’ve been putting off writing about my mother’s untimely death for years. I thought my life wasn’t special enough to write about. I thought that not talking about this moment showed I was over it. But the truth is, I will never be over it. Losing her plays a major part in my life. It’s not my whole life, but it’s my origin story. If I had a target in mind, it was the 17-year-olds out there who need to have their pain acknowledged, but also to know that there will come a day when the sun will rise again. That darkness is temporary.

In 2020, I started writing for myself. Soon enough, as I immersed myself in my memories, I discovered the underlying power in my mother’s story. It wasn’t loud, because survival whispers. Hers was a story about a woman raising two daughters alongside an absent husband in post-communist Romania. To me, it was a story about love and death, and how death only makes the visible invisible. A narrative about strength, loss, and healing, and how complicated all of these can be when you’re a teenager who needs direction.

I wrote for real people. I wanted this book to be raw, unfiltered, powerful. So I chose to have my blurbs written by the people who read the book. I turned this into a Goodreads campaign: the reviews written by readers ended up on my back cover. Every new print run = new reviews. And there have been ten of them since September 2021.

In 2022, the book won the Honorary Award for Nonfiction at the Superscrieri Gala. It’s now officially one of the few creative nonfiction bestsellers in Romania, having sold more than 10k copies. It surpassed my wildest dreams and expectations.

I am currently working on my second book. An essay collection about break-ups, but not in their romantic sense: leaving behind a self image, dealing with friends moving to other countries, breaking up with a toxic work environment etc.