Some Kind of Happiness

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, one in five adults experiences a mental health issue every year, and half of mental health conditions begin by age 14. Yet even with its prevalence, mental health remains a somewhat taboo topic. So it makes sense that mental health concerns would be an important issue to […]

Not long after I became a single mom, my father came to visit me in New York City and he must’ve noticed how much I was struggling because he offered to let me come and live with him in California. I was grateful, but also apprehensive. We had a challenging relationship. But I was hopeful […]

One possible reason is a belief that readers of middle grade age are not yet old enough to experience mental health problems of their own. This belief is of course a misconception, as I know first-hand. Selective mutism, an anxiety condition that the twelve-year-old narrator in my novel After Zero struggles with and that I […]

It’s a truism by now to say that books change lives. But it’s also an everyday miracle, the knowledge that at any point—but particularly, perhaps, when you’re young—you might pick up the book that will help rewrite you, redirect your path, or just plug into a port in your brain that you didn’t know existed, […]