A Call for Help, Heart Health News, and Four Books You Won't Want to Miss

Also: An ode to Writers Tears (the group, not the whiskey. Okay, maybe the whiskey too. 🥃)

News of the Day

Ten months from today, February 18, 2025, my memoir, The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared, will be released from Motina Books. I’m so happy you’re with me on the journey to publication and look forward to engaging with you, my readers, in the coming months.

In case you’re not familiar with my story, here’s what it’s about:

The Full Catastrophe: All I Ever Wanted, Everything I Feared, takes its title from from Zorba the Greek, who says, “Of course I’m married. Wife, children, house, everything. The full catastrophe!” 

After a lifetime of losses, that’s what I wanted too: people who loved me and a place I belonged. Instead, when my marriage collapsed, my children suffered, and later my oldest son died, I got the literal full catastrophe, one I’d never imagined. 

Yet ultimately it’s a hopeful story of finding meaning in the wake of repeated loss, learning to live with grief beside joy, and discovering what true belonging really means.

Calling All Readers: Join my team!

As you may know, an immense group effort is needed to get a book into the world. After writing for 13 years—and writing this book for 7—I’m devoted to helping it find its readers, those who need this story for any number of reasons. That's where you come in.

Will you join my launch team to help spread the word in the months leading up to publication? (Asking for favors is not easy, so if you can’t say yes at this time I fully understand.)

Soon I’ll be sending individual emails to those who have expressed interest or who have touched my life—personally, through writing, grief, and advocacy communities, and beyond—but I wanted to give you, my tribe, a heads up. You heard it here first!

I’ll be asking for support in any (or all) of the following ways:

• preordering the book when it’s available

• reading and posting a review (it can be brief!) to Goodreads, Barnes and Noble, and Amazon (the latter only after publication)

• telling others about the book through word of mouth and/or on social media

• recommending the book to your book club

• recommending a community group host a book talk

• including news about The Full Catastrophe in your newsletter or blog

• sharing your ideas with me about ways to make sure the book reaches the right people

If you’re in, please get in touch by sending me a message in response to this newsletter or reaching out through any means. I’ll be over the moon!

I’ll be updating you monthly here, so if you’re not quite ready to commit, stay tuned. There will be more opportunities in coming months.

In two days, Kevin and I will be heading off to Amelia Island, FL, to take part in the 2024 Family Heart Ambassador Training. We were originally trained as “advocates for awareness” (now known as ambassadors) in January 2018, then returned in 2019 to share what we’d learned in a year of spreading the word about familial hypercholesterolemia.

We’ll be supporting the Family Heart Foundation team in whatever ways they need, and I’ll speak briefly on all of the ways new ambassadors can take the message back with them to share with others in their hometowns and cities around the country.

In a nutshell, ambassadors will help others understand that familial hypercholesterolemia (FH)—the genetic form of extremely high LDL-C, or bad cholesterol—is common (1 in 250 people) yet grossly underidentified (only 20% are accurately diagnosed).

Foundation ambassadors also spread the word about high Lp(a), which is even more common (affecting 1 in 5 people!) and results, like FH, in early heart events and deaths, yet few have heard of it.

We’re excited to see what the weekend holds, reconnect with old friends, and make many new ones. It’s hard to underestimate the power of a room full of people with the same concerns…and dedication to the same cause. I’ll report back next month!

Looking Back to Look Ahead

Those of you who follow me on social media know I’ve been sharing nonstop about my friends’ beautiful books.

Karen DeBonis, Eileen Vorbach Collins, and Mimi Zieman and I have been part of the same virtual writing group for years now, three of us beginning at the dawn of the pandemic and one invited to join the following year. Other members have come and gone, but we’ve stuck together from messy draft to a book contract for each of us. We’ve become the group we fondly refer to as Writers Tears.

Here’s why:

When Kevin and I were returning from a trip to Ireland a couple of years ago, this bottle of Writers Tears Irish whiskey caught my eye. How perfect, especially when I’d been slaving over my manuscript and cringing with each essay or query rejection (no shame in this—it’s the name of the game for writers at all levels).

Though I hadn’t noticed it was produced by Walsh Whiskey (!), I bought a bottle, vowing to open it when I signed a contract for publication of my memoir. A year and a half later, that’s just what I did.

Fast forward to Mimi’s book launch party for Tap Dancing on Everest in Atlanta last weekend. One of our original group members, Lindsey DeLoach Jones, was a surprise guest, and what did she unknowingly bring to mark the occasion? You guessed it.

Great minds.

Writers Tears!

Please do check out the three beautiful books that have already come out of our band of four. I’ll be reviewing each in a future newsletter, but for now trust me when I say, each of them is a must read in its own unique way. Covering topics from medical gaslighting and people pleasing (Growth), to surviving the loss of a child to suicide (Love in the Archives), to finding one’s voice and charting one’s own path—up the world’s highest mountain! (Tap Dancing on Everest)—you won’t want to miss even one of these stories.

Inspiration Everywhere

Late to the party as is often the case, my recent literary obsession is Pema Chodron’s When Things Falls Apart.

When things fell apart for me—and fall apart they did—I fought and prayed and begged and clawed my way to a place where I finally understood that all my best efforts were not going to “fix” things. At least not in the way I wanted them to be fixed. That was when I understood I needed to find a way to see things differently.

As Viktor Frankl famously wrote, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.

All these years later, picking up Chodron’s landmark book has brought all of the wisdom that helped me scratch the surface of finding peace in the midst of chaos back to me in a new way. It couldn’t have come at a better time.

Because after all, when aren’t we in the middle of a trying time in one area of our lives or another? When aren’t we in the scary in-between? Our nature is to fight to get back to a place that comforted us or to leap ahead to a time when we’re safe and comfortable again.

It wasn’t until I was forced to lean into the fear that I understood what Chodron knew all along":

“Moving toward painful situations and becoming intimate with them can open up our hearts in ways we never before imagined.”

I’m grateful for this book and the wisdom it holds.

And that’s all for this month.

• Please get in touch if you’d like to join my launch team. I’d be so grateful for your support.

• If your LDL-C cholesterol is over 190, doesn’t change with lifestyle modifications, and you have a family history of early heart events, you could have FH. Feel free to get in touch—I’d be happy to chat with you and point you in the right direction to get the information you need.

• Check out the books I mentioned in this newsletter. I highly recommend each of them!

Till next time,

Casey