Stay

A richly woven memoir that explores the joyous and painful complexity of relationships, the generational cost of family secrets, and the quest to help loved ones struggling with mental or medical illness without losing ourselves.

Hailed by critics as profound, funny, and masterfully told, Stay: A Story of Family, Love, & Other Traumas is a richly woven memoir that explores the joyous and painful complexity of relationships, the generational cost of family secrets, and the struggle to help those we love without losing ourselves.

“What happened to Danny”—how Julie Fingersh’s family often referred to her brother’s life story—had always been sealed in sacred privacy, tucked away from friends, neighbors, roommates, and colleagues. Things like this did not happen to people like them.

Decades later, a different something happened. But this time Julie wasn’t a young sister trying to help her beloved little brother—she was a mother grappling with mid-life, and it was her own child whose life suddenly careened off track.

Stay is for everyone struggling to help loved ones plagued by depression, mental illness, or the isolating veil of chronic illness. For everyone wrestling with mid-life’s ghosts and the twin pillagers of self-judgment and fear.

But above all, Stay is for readers who want to think, feel, laugh, cry, and consider their own life’s journey; it’s a messy, funny, heart-wrenching story about how to overcome the blueprint of our past and rise to the possibility of our own lives.

Julie Fingersh is a writer and freelance journalist. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Oprah Magazine, Huffington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, Miami Herald, BusinessWeek, and more. Her Substack newsletter, Take my Advice. I’m Not Using It is a midlife sequel to an award-winning humor column she wrote in New York City in her twenties for Billboard Publications, Inc. Julie also served as the founding executive director of Boston Cares, which became a nationally recognized model for community and corporate partnerships and recently celebrated its third decade of service. A Kansas City native, she has two adult children and lives with her husband in Marin County, California. Read more about Julie and her work at http://www.juliefingershauthor.com.

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