A forthright and tender memoir about searching for fulfillment everywhere except the one place it lives.
Have you ever been in an unpleasant, difficult, or downright terrible situation and been told that the challenge is an opportunity in disguise? That you might have more to gain by moving forward than by staying comfortably, safely stuck? Kathleen Branigan has. Her memoir, Into the Flow, is proof that they might have been right. As the sweeping memoir opens, Branigan is a college freshman in rural Ohio when her mother, Maureen, announces she has breast cancer. What follows is years of remission and relapse, a cycle of doubt, guilt, and anger, an experimental transplant that goes horribly wrong, and eventually a run of losses that leaves Kathleen questioning the full-throttle Catholic faith she was raised in. Adrift, she trades tech marketing for a nonprofit, exits a marriage that no longer works, weans herself off antidepressants, and throws herself at an East-meets-West spiritual buffet that includes teachers and coaches, meditation, a fierce blue Hindu goddess, ayahuasca in the Amazon, and a trek through Peru. These experiences provide Branigan with a little adventure and a lot of perspective. Ultimately, she chases freedom across therapists, relationships, and continents before learning it had been hiding within herself the whole time.
Some journeys don’t end where you point them, and Kathleen Branigan’s has led to a spirituality she never saw coming, to an awakening that required letting go of so many things, and to a romantic partner who is older, wiser, and exactly right for her. This is a woman who stopped fighting the current and let it take her somewhere better and truer than any plan could have. Readers will admire the author’s honest admissions and appreciate her irreverent, self-deprecating voice. From chapter titles that work as tiny jokes, like “Does This Suffering Make My Chakras Look Fat?”, to her assessment of a man doing a poor job of selling himself as a sugar-mama-seeking domestic, Branigan’s humor cuts through even the heaviest scenes. She fails her way through meditation, Catholicism, and couples counseling with such wit and candor that by the time everything comes together, audiences are rooting for her clarity as much as she is. Lessons are taken from ancient philosophers and Walter White in the same breath, so readers can appreciate the intelligent observations while laughing at life’s endless ironies. A forthright and tender memoir about searching for fulfillment everywhere except the one place it lives, Into the Flow is the heartfelt journey of a woman throwing off the weight of a life that doesn’t fit and emerging lighter, healthier, and far more herself on the other side.
