Michelle Gartner, Writer and Journalist

At fifty, Michelle joins the Peace Corps, convinced it will be her final act of leaving. Sent to Botswana, she finds herself in a perilous situation when she refuses to give two men what they want. Defying her training, she fights them both, sustaining debilitating injuries. The encounter triggers PTSD Michelle doesn't know she has, forcing her to confront the inherited trauma she spent a lifetime trying to outrun. Michelle's leaving begins when she is eight and attempts her first escape. The plan is simple: head to the forest and embark on an adventure to free her from a boisterous family infected by her mother's schizophrenic, murderous fury. She makes it only as far as the sandbox behind the garage. The failed escape begins a forty-three-year journey to break the cycle of intergenerational trauma. Raised by a severely mentally ill mother, Michelle is taught that sorrow has no place and self-pity is weakness—the same survival techniques her mother relied on. She grows up swallowing grief she is never allowed to name and, forty years later, is still trying to escape. Living among the Batswana—whose country was once the poorest nation in the world and later the hardest hit by HIV/AIDS—Michelle encounters a nation that has experienced profound loss and found a way to carry it differently. She begins to wonder if the past was never meant to be outrun, but instead understood and accepted.