a memoir in sixteen essays
belonging
a memoir about love and loss
"It is not exaggeration when I tell you that your book is everything I wanted and didn't know how to express from Eat, Pray, Love 20 years ago."
— Maggie, a friend since elementary school
Shonna has lost more people than most — friends to suicide, cancer, accidents, and sudden illness, many of them before she turned thirty. And every time grief arrived, she reached for connection: sometimes wisely, sometimes recklessly, almost always with her whole heart.
be longing traces that reaching — through first loves and heartbreaks, through sexual awakening and identity, through friendships that became family and relationships that defied easy categories. It follows Shonna from a small conservative California town where she never quite fit in, through her twenties in Southern California, her early thirties in San Francisco, and eventually to Medellín, Colombia, where she finally began to feel at home in herself.
These are stories about what happens when you refuse to stop loving even after love has cost you everything. For anyone who has ever felt like too much and not enough at the same time. For anyone still trying to find their people. For anyone who knows that belonging isn't something you find — it's something you build.
