I wasn't sure about including this on my website, but it is woven deeply into my work.
It is part of what makes me, me.
It is The Rest Of My Story.
I WROTE A MEMOIR
Last year, breast cancer shattered my world. Now that I am remission and the light is returning to me from the darkness, it is a different light. Something supernatural, softer, a light that goes on forever. Last year, I thought I would never see the light again.
This book does not document treatments, but tries to make sense of tragic grief I felt, the silence of the universe, and my slow return to self. Becoming Light is my story of emotional and spiritual healing — written for the other sensitive souls who have been faced with random tragedy and loss of identity.
Becoming Light is available as a Kindle eBook and in a soft cover print version. It is a short memoir with invitations for reflection.
This book is a companion for those navigating pain, transformation, and the quiet miracle of becoming whole again.
It is a book of transcendence.
"Writing this book was cathartic. I had this grand desire to write to the women like me — the ones who felt everything a bit too deeply. The women who lost their anchor in this universe when tragedy befell them. The women who didn’t wear all the pink ribbons or call themselves warriors, or make tutorials about how to tie a cute head scarf.
I wrote this for the empathic, sensitive, distraught bearers of light who felt their worlds had been erased through suffering. For the women who wondered about evil and pain and asked, Why? For the women who contemplated death in the privacy of their own hearts. Whose hearts were broken into so many pieces."
"I suddenly realized I wouldn’t live forever. Before that moment, I never really considered my own mortality. My own fragility and impermanence. Because I had lived, like many of us, in the soft spell of assumed continuity. I thought life would stretch on, that the people I loved would stay, that the future was a horizon I’d keep walking toward. I thought I had time."
Early reviews for "Becoming Light"
"I really appreciated Jennifer’s raw honesty in Becoming Light. Her perspective on living with cancer is refreshingly different — she doesn’t frame herself as a “warrior,” and she doesn’t try to fit into any pinkwashed narrative. That really resonated with me personally.
Her reflections feel deeply personal, yet she offers them in a way that invites the reader in — especially through the thoughtful questions she includes. This isn’t a typical cancer story; it’s something more intimate, spiritual, and human. I would recommend it to anyone who’s looking for something real — especially those who might feel unseen by mainstream narratives around illness."
"A beautiful testimony to maneuvering through the emotional burden of a cancer diagnosis."
"Wow! You wrote this for me, I’m one of the women who needed this. Who wishes they had this in 2013, and last year… This is so honest, so real. There’s a rawness, there’s a softness, there’s so much of you. I could actually hear you reading the words to me. And when you said you ran your hands through your wild new hair, I could see it, because I’ve seen you do it. I’ve seen the difference in your eyes as well. The wonder is back in them and I love how you write about all of it."