Compost Happens: Growing a Flourishing Life After Childhood Abuse

One woman's journey of transforming childhood sexual abuse into compost to grow a flourishing life.

Thirteen-year-old and motherless, Diana is determined to care for and protect her younger siblings despite their father's constant abuse. But when his cruel girlfriend convinces him to send her away, she is spun into a decades-long battle to reconnect with her family and find wholeness within herself. Join Diana's journey as she chases true healing, from coast to coast and beyond, through doomed marriages to two men and one woman, to living on a sailboat, and from careers as a secretary to that of a newspaper photographer, minister, and neuropsychologist. It is only through great loss that Diana is finally able to find the family, and the love, that she's been searching for all along.

This is a powerful and inspiring book of courage and healing from the trauma of sexual abuse. It tells the story of Diana's remarkable life and her story of survival, love, the pain of longing for family, and her ultimate healing. The book deeply moved me, the way that Diana shares her love and honesty through this painful journey, her remarkable courage in facing the harm of sexual abuse and her own powerful story of survival in finding her authentic self and her "home." I hope the book inspires others, as the book says, to "fly free as the butterfly tearing through her chrysalis."

-Jane Pillinger, PhD, International Consultant on Ending Gender-Based Violence