Short version: the events are true as I remember them, the names mostly aren't, and I'm careful with anything you send me.
This isn’t quite a book.
At least, I’m not sure that’s what we’re calling it yet.
LUCKY is an experiment in what storytelling can become when we stop pretending a story has to live entirely between two covers.
You’ll read chapters, but you’ll also encounter pieces of the life behind them — photographs, old posts, music, archived messages, videos, documents and other things I happened to save along the way.
Some will appear when you first read a chapter.
Others won’t.
Certain pieces of the archive will unlock later, after you’ve learned something that changes their meaning.
Because that’s how memory works.
We rarely understand the importance of something while we’re living it. We understand it years later, when another piece of the puzzle suddenly clicks into place and makes us look backward differently.
That’s also why you’re not just a reader here.
You’re QA.
I’ve spent much of my career testing software by looking for patterns, finding what doesn’t quite add up, asking what happens if…? and noticing things other people miss.
I’m inviting you to do the same thing with my life.
There are Easter eggs intentionally hidden throughout this story. There are patterns I recognize only because I can see them in hindsight. There may also be connections you notice before I do.
Argue about whether something is psychology, coincidence, pattern recognition, synchronicity — or just a coffee cup somebody stared at for way too long.
I won’t tell you what to believe.
In fact, that’s part of the point.
This is the story of how a woman who spent most of her life believing she was simply unlucky began looking backward and questioning the story she’d been telling herself about what had happened to her — and eventually, who she was.
Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect people’s privacy. A few have intentionally remained. Conversations and scenes are reconstructed from my memories, photographs, messages, social media posts, documents and other records I’ve collected over the years. Memory is imperfect. When something represents my interpretation rather than an objective fact, I’ve tried to let it remain exactly that.
This story deals with real people and real pain.
But it also contains a lot of really weird shit.
Welcome to LUCKY.
The story has already happened.
Your job is to figure out what it means.
— Lucky
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LUCKY includes divorce, estrangement, mental-health struggles, suicidal thoughts, childhood trauma and difficult family dynamics. It’s written with warmth rather than shock, but it doesn’t look away.