A few months ago, the daughter of a dear friend who was about to turn 80 asked a number of his friends to write him a letter. Her plan was to collect the letters into a handmade book for him. “Not an email,” she clarified. “An actual handwritten letter, maybe with some stories of your friendship.” It was such a wonderful idea.

The only trouble was, I found myself not getting around to it.

I kept thinking about it, deciding which stories to include, but day after day went by without my having done it. Eventually, I decided I needed to make a date of it: to take myself out of the house and to a café, where I would sit down with some beautiful letter-writing paper (and no phone), the way I used to so often do. The way I used to LOVE to do. Indeed, there was a time in my life when I would spend several hours every day writing letter after letter after letter to friends and acquaintances around the world. I’m sure it was that practice that made me a writer.

But as my friend’s 80th birthday approached, I kept noticing the days-without-letter-writing flitting by. It was as puzzling as it was disconcerting.

A few days before the deadline, I wrote to his daughter and promised I would courier my letter the following day. “Actually, please don’t worry about it,” she replied immediately. “Almost no one has done it, so I might just give it to him at the end of the summer.”

It was so sad. But at least I wasn’t the only one, I consoled myself, emptily.

And then I spent the ensuing months still not getting around to it.

Until today. The final deadline to send in our letters is tomorrow(!), so I woke up this morning announcing—aloud—that I AM NOT ALLOWED TO DO ANYTHING ELSE UNTIL I WRITE THAT LETTER! (You’d think I had to dip my hand in acid. Writing letters was something I used to love. What was my problem??)

Well, first I had to find some paper worthy of a handwritten letter and who owns that stuff anymore? I emptied drawers looking for something other than bald-white printer paper, scoured shelves, considered writing on birch bark (of which I have quite a collection) or cutting pages out of an expensive journal I hadn’t begun yet. Eventually, I found a watercolour-wash painting my son had done when he was in about Grade 3 (at a Waldorf school) and decided to use that. Then, I made myself a coffee, grabbed a fountain pen (my travel Lamy), and sat down to a long view of undulating green.

Friends, I was so out of practice, I’d honestly forgotten how this was done. Should I write a practice draft first on less nice paper? What if I wrote something I didn’t like and wanted to cross it out? (Did I used to just cross it out?) How do I EDIT? It was all so awkward. Just as I had feared. But I could not believe how quickly it changed once I stopped chewing my lips and just began. How easily and joyfully I melted back into the act of swimming words onto the page while imagining my friend on the other side of them.

And then the magic happened, just as I so often remember it doing: the letter began to write itself. To become a weaving of thought and heart and memory and laughter and love that I could never have imagined before it happened. I almost trailed behind the words rather than composed them. In a way, they began to compose me.

When I finished the last line and signed my name, I put down my pen, tilted my head back and, to my wide surprise, wept. With love for my friend. With the tender honesty that true letters expose. And for how, in a hurried world, the quietly sacred can get so easily trampled by noisier, more tangled concerns.

Since finishing the letter, I’ve felt a sort of effervescent satisfaction — did it, at last! — and also a gentle joy. That feeling that accompanies the simple making of something, and the sharing of it.

So, here’s to the beauty of the handwritten letter, not only for the person who receives it (remember the thrill of opening the mailbox to find the familiar handwriting of someone you love?), but also for the person who writes it, both of whom can be embraced by the exchange.

If there is someone you love who might be lifted by a handwritten note from you, I can only heartily encourage you to write it.

Ideally, today. :)

The other day, I was sitting on the front porch, being nourished by a gorgeous book {The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza} as the sunset spilled over Sky Lake. The writing was as thunderous as it was tender, every sentence felt exquisitely tuned, and the weaving themes and songs of the book were echoes of my own heart.

So I was rapt, and entranced, my mind alive with the internal symphony that the reading of a great book invites.

And then I reached the end of a chapter, a closing sentence that was so original, so uniquely and deliberately calibrated that it parted my mouth, and I sighed.

Ohhhh.

I was in awe of the writing. That was obvious. But as I sat with the sensation, a sort of sparkling in my chest, I was not dazzled by the sentences themselves. What I felt was reverence for this writer’s heart and mind, her life and vision, all that she had endured and sacrificed and felt and experienced and wondered and loved and ached for, and how she had managed to transmute all of that into the masterful carpentry of language that I had just read.

I sat alone at sunset with only a lake and the sky in sight, but I felt a transcendent connection to another human being and the uniqueness of her life on earth.

What mattered to me, in other words, was not that it was written, but that SHE had written it.

It made me smile and smile and smile.

By contrast, the following day, I was invited to a workshop on ‘AI Voice Cloning’ that promised to “Make your AI voice sound more authentic.” It was a typo (I assumed). What they meant to say (surely?) was “Make your AI voice sound more deceitful”? Either way, I deleted the invitation and tried not to retch.

Because I’ve been finding myself increasingly gut-punched when I am in the midst of reading something and I realise (or strongly suspect) that it’s been written (or “enhanced” or, ugh, “thought-partnered”) by AI.

Last week, Tom Rachman (novelist, journalist, and AI Policy Writer at Google DeepMind in London) wrote an interesting piece in The Globe and Mail called The Value of Human Writing in the Age of AI.

“The instant I discover that what I’m reading -- perhaps rather interesting -- is AI-generated, I suddenly don’t care. The words dim before me. It’s an off-switch.”

I nodded so hard when I read that that my head practically fell off my neck.

He goes on:

“So, when reading human, you’re absorbing the meaning with one eye while focusing the other on its maker, ever trying to reconcile the two, much as the visual cortex creates 3-D from the parallax of two eyes synthesizing one object at duelling angles. If you see that the author was AI, one eye closes. The page becomes markings on a flat surface.

The reader’s presumption of a human behind the words makes secret AI authorship worse than betrayal. It’s trespassing and fraud at once, entering another’s brain on false pretenses and altering the contents for gain, whether it’s AI-generated reviews that trick you into feeding at someone’s restaurant, or an AI-generated marriage proposal that tricks you into feeding someone’s children. It’s the sale of a shared reality, from an entity that has no reality to share.”

Yes, I thought (and felt) when I read that. That’s it exactly.

So, I’d like to raise a flag for shared reality, authenticity, and the hard-won beauty of human creativity.

I know these things are increasingly out of fashion, but I find myself appreciating them all the more, with every true sentence, every honest-to-goodness sigh, and every sunset.

A few months after she died, I was snowshoeing through the forest, when I had an idea. Or rather, Amy passed me an idea. Or rather, she pressed a thought into the shape of a snowflake, blew it off a high branch and let it spiral down and land on my nose, at which point I smiled and looked up, blinked a few times, and felt like I had an idea. (Pick your preferred understanding of inspiration.)

The idea was to create a literary contest in Amy’s honour and donate the proceeds to her living legacy fund for ovarian cancer research.

The contest is now in its sixth year. We have received thousands of submissions from writers all over the world, raised tens of thousands of dollars for Amy’s Living Legacy, and watched our shortlisted writers get publishing contracts and agents. It’s been a beautiful, beautiful project.

So, it is with great sadness that I chose to close the award after this current contest [submission deadline: July 1]. I hope the video explains that decision sufficiently well.

To learn more, or submit to the final Amy Award contest, click HERE.

The contest was created in celebration of the life of Amy MacRae and in support of her living legacy fund to improve the outcomes of women with ovarian cancer.

This year’s judge, Merilyn Simonds, talks about what she might be looking for in a story or how she will know the winning story when she reads it.

In light of all the recent talk about using AI to help you write, it’s particularly interesting to hear what Merilyn has to say about VOICE.

For more information about the Amy Award, click HERE.

The submission deadline is July 1, 2026.

AI is being heralded as the answer to all our problems, including our literary ones—Write your book in 6 weeks with AI!—but as is the case with so many other technological tools, AI may actually create more knots than it untangles. While most of us wish we could write faster and more efficiently than we do, using AI to write your memoir can present some serious, even perilous, issues.

For one thing, the most important element of memoir writing— bar none—is voice.

You find your voice when you stop looking, stop pretending, stop trying to sound smarter or more eloquent or more evolved or more anything than you truly, humbly are. The voice of your memoir is your authentically imperfect self, the way you would tell a story to your best friend while sitting together on the couch in your slightly rank pyjamas, laughing or crying so hard that you’re wiping snot on your sleeve, knowing that she loves you too much to care.

Voice is what reassures us that you’re being real with us. It’s what makes us trust you enough to read on.

The writer Mary Karr goes so far as to say that “memoir lives and dies 100% on voice.” One hundred percent.

What Karr means is that no matter how interesting the story might be, if the narrator’s voice isn’t strong and authentic—if we don’t hear it in our minds, ringing true as we read (grab any page from a Mary Karr book and you’ll see what I mean)—readers won’t be drawn in. We won’t trust or develop a relationship with the writer, and the story won’t lift into our hearts. It won’t matter to us. It will just read as a series of things that happened to someone we don’t really know or feel connected to.

Voice is what brings the narrator to LIFE. It isn’t just an important element, it’s THE critical one. And unless your voice is genuinely weirdly-empty-plastic, AI won’t be able to make the writing ‘sound like you,’ no matter how much it assures you it can (at least right now, as we’re constantly told it will improve).

So getting AI to ‘write for you’ siphons the power from your memoir, but it also robs you of agency and creative fulfillment.

I liken it to the difference between learning to play a particular piece of music on the piano and getting AI to make an audio file of someone like you playing that piece on the piano.

It’s ridiculous, of course, because the whole point of learning to play a piece of music is actually learning to play that piece of music. It’s the richness and challenge of that experience. It’s the inner architecture that develops when we engage in a creative act. It’s the way our minds and hearts expand, the way we feel when we’re doing it, and the way that feeling changes and enhances who we are.

It’s also about the growth we achieve when we stick with it, even when it’s difficult. And it’s that transcendent release, when time evaporates and the music begins to flow through us and become part of who we are. It’s the furthest thing from a quick fix, in other words; it’s a slow, gradual, gratifying and embodied experience. It is the internal wing-beat of creative energy that emerges as ideas open and revelations arise.

Being creative makes us feel more alive.

There is no doubt that AI can put a great many words onto a (virtual) page very quickly. It can organise and summarise (its meeting notes are far superior to the tedious old-fashioned “minutes,” for instance), and it can sound very convincing about everything, even things it gets completely wrong. (Notably, the people in my life who know the most about AI are the most wary of it.) Sometimes, AI can even appear to have a creative insight.

But it’s actually anti-creative.

What ‘Large Language Models’ like ChatGPT and Claude do is pull on the aggregate of information on the internet and produce the most likely response to a question or request based on (almost) everything that’s been written before (including copyrighted literature that it trained on illegally). It’s vastly complex predictive-model regurgitation. That is what AI excels at.

The results look impressive, in that it will produce a lot of words quickly {wow!} and confidently {wow!} and the document will look coherent and organised {wow!}. But, in my experience, beneath the surface gleam often lie shallow-shiny ideas, predictable rhythms, and a weirdly hollow voice.

Even more importantly, though, as with learning to play an instrument, the whole point of any creative endeavour is actually the inner process, the act and art of creating, not a hastily-produced product made by a machine. So while you might have a piece of writing, you’ve skipped right over the part where you’re enriched by the experience of creating it.

Writing is a practice that sharpens and deepens our expressive and reflective capacities. Memoir writing specifically involves the excavation and exploration of our lives and stories, and then the shaping, sculpting and recasting of those stories in fresh and ever-changing light. Far from being a series of events that happened to you, memoir is a broadening and deepening understanding of the meaning of those events—not to others, or to a machine, but to you and your irreplaceable heart.

Like anything profoundly valuable, this takes time, reflection, and often frustration and pain (which we would love to avoid or outsource), and it can be tempting to want to reach for something that will get us to the finish line as quickly as possible. But in doing so, we risk missing another of the important gifts on offer.

Our stories have an uncanny way of changing as we write them. We think we know what the story is and what it means, but only when we are in the thick of it, facing the complexity of our knotted human lives, pulling and examining the writing from a variety of angles and perspectives, does the ‘actual story’ begin to unspool itself.

It is a mysterious process, and it can be as startling as it is illuminating, transformative in ways the writer couldn’t have imagined at the outset, with insights that can alter the way the writer sees herself, others, and her life as a whole. Through writing our stories, we often change our relationship to them and their hold over us.

Not unlike what happens when we embody music, writing our stories can awaken in us a swirl of intuition and awareness, a sensitivity to nuance, and a perspicacity that can help us to become better authors, not just of our past stories, but of our present and future lives.

When it’s done well, this work can forge compassion and empathy, spawn unexpected understandings and acceptance. It can foster forgiveness, of ourselves and others. It can mend hearts. It can connect us as human beings, weaving us into the collective tapestry of humanity.

As far as I know, AI doesn’t do any of those things.

But maybe you just want to use AI to check your grammar and punctuation. (Grammarly is great for that, but don’t have it on as you write!) Or you might think of using it to brainstorm ideas, or to organise your thoughts or a scatter of documents and scenes. AI is terrific at organising and summarising, and highly proficient at filling a page with things that weren’t there moments earlier. But as with any tool (particularly a technological one), the key is to use it well, and not to be used or disempowered by it.

Partway through the writing of this piece, when the first half felt pretty coherent but there were all kinds of raw ideas and partial sentences in a muddled heap at the end, I did an experiment. It was the annoying part of writing, the chaotic stage, when you just want someone to swoop in and take over. I got up from my desk, put on some music and danced for a while. Then, when I would normally sit down and take that dance into the writing, I fed it all into AI instead, giving the instruction to take all my wandering thoughts and half-formed ideas and sentences and turn them into a coherent, satisfying completion to the essay, using my voice and style.

What came back was so dreadful, so pablum-trying-to-pass-as-pasta, that I tightened my instructions and told it to try again. To which it only produced more pablum.

“Ha!” I wrote. “You’re only proving my point.”

Here was its response:

You’re right, I’m doing exactly what you’re warning against — producing something smooth and organised that’s lost all the life of the original.

The problem is that the raw material genuinely is a string of unfinished thoughts, abandoned sentences, and fragments. I can’t sculpt it without making choices about what you actually meant to say — and those are your choices, not mine.

I couldn’t agree more.

Discovering and crafting your personal story, in your own time and in your own true voice, using your own heart as your compass, has the potential to be one of the most empowering and rewarding things you will ever do.

I would think twice about handing that over to AI.

Actually, I’d think a lot more times than that.

But ultimately, it’s your choice.

And your voice.

I sat down with it, cracked the cover for the first time in over a decade, and memories began billowing up from the pages: faces and voices of all the people who welcomed me into their homes and fed me, dropped whatever plans they might have had for the day to introduce me to their city's finest architecture, a favourite restaurant, the tombstone of a famous poet, the mayor, the mayor's mother, a friend on the edge of town with a ping pong table.

There were the people who took me shopping for my hejab, who collapsed with laughter trying to brush my (unbrushable!) hair, people who sang to me in airports, taught me to cook, people who bewildered me, others who frightened me, people whose generosity astounded me, whose kindness left me breathless, and people who put their hands on their hearts and thanked me for coming to their beloved and beleaguered country. We are not our government, they said again and again. We are just people.

When I got home, I spent the next few years trying to paint them all into words. To lift them beyond the political lens through which they were most often viewed and see them as human beings in a complicated world.

In doing so, I wrote my first book, but more importantly, I fell in love with writing as an invitation to compassion, the possibilities we make way for when we use language as a tool of the heart.

“Nothing is taken more for granted,” my stepfather told me one night after dinner, as bits of salad wilted on his plate and cancer crept through the marrow of him. “When you’re healthy, you don’t give it a second thought. You just spend all your time getting worked up about all kinds of other things,” he laughed, a quick smile cracking the stiffness of his face.

No. It wasn’t a smile exactly, though his teeth were there. He stared at his plate, at the bits of green food he hoped would restore him, and he whispered, “Everything else you can do without, but if you don’t have your health, you have nothing.”

A few weeks later, my mother and I found him curled up on the carpet, his face smooth and blue with cold blood. When we pulled him up, he exhaled. Or so we thought. It was his last breath, trapped until our stirring released it, a sigh that was the last of him escaping.

That night I dreamed my stepfather had a ceramic face that smiled until it fell away in shards, until all that was left was a radiant joy—something between a light and a song.

This morning, years later, I can feel that light-song flowing into me as I breathe, and I take a moment to honour my stepfather’s words and the casual miracle of my health. I don’t give a second thought to the soft power in my belly and the life in my bones; I give it my first.

From there, I move to my pillow, a down-puff extravagance, a gift from last Christmas. Such bountiful softness, how lucky my head and neck are to be cradled there. I continue on to my feet, warm from the previous night’s hot water bottle, the same one I used as a child, when school nerves would turn my stomach to snakes and I was calmed by the weight of its warmth. My toes reach for the last traces of heat and I take delight in this small sensation before turning my attention to the bed that has housed my resting body yet again. I pat it—thanks, bed—then crawl my fingers across the weaving of Mexican wool against my body, especially delicious this morning, when it is minus-twenty outside and I can see my breath when I exhale. The fire must have twisted itself to ashes during the night, while I glowed between wool, water, feathers, and dreams.

I could complain.

Until recently, I awoke to bougainvillea and birdsong, the reliability of hot sunlight lifting over the neighbouring mountains. For five glorious years, Mexico cooed me out of bed with the promise of papaya and mango, freshly roasted coffee from a friend’s garden and creamy ripe avocados. There was the rustle of fringe-leaved banana trees and the seduction of flowers in every imaginable colour—fuchsia, magenta, vermilion, azure. It was a culture more prone to dance than depression.

Recently, we returned to rural Ontario, to the snow and the cold and a shy, reluctant sun. Here there are bare trees and a new colour: grey—varieties of it everywhere. There’s silence, the stillness of ice and a long, annual death. And there are people less inclined to spontaneous fiestas than to going home, closing the door, and staying there.

It has been an adjustment, this move to the eastern shore of Lake Huron, a hundred and fifty miles northwest of Toronto. Since arriving here, my vocabulary has increased by two compound words: the first is “storm-stayed,” an adjective that describes the condition of being unable to go out due to excessive snowfall, prolonged whiteouts being a regular occurrence in this area. My son’s teacher once went to a friend’s house for dinner and was storm-stayed there for six days.

The second expression is employed when the buildup of snow in the centre of the road is so high that the car’s body becomes suspended, its wheels spinning fruitlessly above the ruts on either side. She’s “belly-hung,” she is, and the driver probably storm-stayed—one condition lending itself quite naturally to the other. That’s charming from a linguistic vantage point and rather less quaint when it is twenty below, the wind is raging outside the car, there is no cellphone reception, no one has driven by in more than an hour, and a nearby house is a hope rather than a certainty.

I have a right to complain, I’m told by those who see the struggle of my transition. And I do for a while, cringing at the weather and the colossal, impersonal grocery store that has replaced my Mexican village marketplace with its colourful sacks of spices and chilies, its volcanoes of fresh fruits and vegetables, its ancient women with long, grey braids selling eggs, wild berries, and flowers from their gardens. Shortly after returning to Canada, I visited my new northern supermarket and in the middle of aisle ten, the one devoted entirely to the myriad relatives of the potato chip and its cousin, the carbonated beverage, I laid my forehead on the handle of my shopping cart and briefly wept.

I could go on.

But I also have a right to be happy, as my mother pointed out one day on the telephone. “Why complain when you could appreciate all you have?” she asked simply.

I opened my mouth to argue, but nothing came out.

So the next morning, I began with my health, closing my eyes and sinking into the luxury of it. The blissful pulse of life I am so privileged to embody. The tickle of air entering the tunnel of my nostrils and wafting into my chest. The light-song singing into my cell tissue. Then to my pillow—lucky head. My hot water bottle—grateful toes. The blanket of colourful warmth around my body.

Gracias.

I slide out of bed, don a sweater, and snuggle soft stitched leather around my feet. Blessed moccasins hold me above the chill of the floor, as I tiptoe past two boys sleeping in the next room and smile at the gift of their being there. I crouch in front of the wood stove, assemble a small pile of kindling over a curl of birch bark, and reach for matches—striking into another wonder: fire in a box. Access to life-giving heat with one measly flick of the wrist.

I add a few lengths of chopped wood, content in knowing that in less than an hour, the house will be warm again. In the meantime, I slide into snow pants and reach for my boots, astronaut-sized clunkers that come up to my knees. I pull on my coat and, lastly, I add mittens so cozy that they’re like tiny duvets. I give my fingers a moment to wiggle around their soft surroundings before heading outside.

The air is so cold it slaps my face, lifting my energy instantly. I listen to my heart pick up its pace, feel it in my ears, its determination to keep me alive. Turning, I face a rare sight in these parts: the sun. Today there is a thick yolk of light surfacing on the horizon and the sky is a Mexican ceramic blue.

Inhaling, I reach up, touch the tips of my mittens together. Exhaling, I pull a piece of the sky to my heart. Inhaling, I arch back into an invocation of flexibility, fearlessness, a willingness to bend toward what I cannot see. Exhaling, I bend forward to touch the earth. One boot flies out behind me and I push into postures of agility and strength, the sun warming my teeth as I smile. Snow crunches against my wrists. I lift and lunge, stand and reach, my hands gathering into prayer position and drawing down, slowly, to my heart. “Snowga,” my partner calls this new habit of mine: yoga in the snow.

Often I burst out laughing, especially when images of people doing asanas on tropical beaches come to mind, yet I take this practice seriously. This practice of seeing the rightness in everything rather than zeroing in on what seems wrong. Of thanking the cold for charging me awake rather than wincing at the discomfort of it. Of admiring the beauty of snowflakes and storms. Of appreciating my own wondrous breath and the kindness of a stranger who “un-belly-hangs” my car. It is a practice that invites happiness to arise.

Once I get the hang of it, I add one more step to the practice: dropping the labels altogether and simply allowing things to be as they are. Neither “right” nor “beautiful” nor “bloody cold.” Just as it is—this moment, this life.

My breath puffs beyond my lips. A spiral of smoke rises from the chimney. I bow to my health. To my stepfather. To this day. In the distance, a family of deer dances along the horizon, antlered angels skimming a cloud.

I bow to them and head inside.

It is time to chop wood and melt snow for tea.

Alison Wearing is a bestselling, award-winning author, playwright, and performer. She is also the creator/facilitator of Memoir Writing Ink, a popular online program that has guided thousands of people through the process of transforming personal stories into memoir. Alison leads writing retreats in Canada and Europe, and otherwise devotes herself to being a force of kindness, colour, and joy in this world. www.alisonwearing.com

There was a trail I used to walk when I was broken, decades ago, after I'd scooped my heart from my chest and passed it to a man, who'd winced, shrugged, and said, ummmm, no thanks.

We’ve all been there.

It was spring then, and life felt obscene with pleasure and new life: buds and crocuses and every songbird in the neighbourhood pining for a date. Avian Tinder.

I walked a lot in those days, took long circular hikes because it was the thing that hurt less than everything else. Working: agony. Socializing: torture. Television: depressing. Eating: impossible. So: walking. And reading. Rereading, actually, because I could not yet bear the promise of new story. And because I needed to be reminded of who I had been.

Before the flaying.

To say that revisiting familiar books was comforting misses the mark. It was reassembling. As if skeins of myself existed in the stories that had first woven me into being and I was gathering them now, twirling them together, purling myself back into form.

To this, and to the walking, I credit my reemergence. And to nature, its determined lessons: that death is nourishment; that the one true goal is light; that beauty is generous and everywhere; that joy is not sought, but allowed.

What I noticed about the walking, the daily circles I sketched into the land, was how it felt to become intimate with the familiar, to move through the same space again and again, to be intrigued by its subtleties.

The first time we hike, we see the view, the wow, the scale, the grand outline of cliffs against sky. It is awe and appreciation. But it is a flash, meteoric and fleeting, at once memorable and evanescent.

It is when we return, and continue to return, that we notice more: the ripple-shadows that hover beyond the shapes themselves, the dancing lace of light through leaves, how many times trees catch each other when they fall, the patience of hawks, the shelf of strength that builds in us through the long, silent witnessing of cliffs.

A similar thing happens with books.

When we read a book the first time, we see the story, the wow, the characters and their intrigues, we feel the anticipation of an unfurling plot. If we are enjoying the book, we don’t want it to end. But it does! It ends. And is shelved.

It is only when we return that we see: the invisible architecture that houses the story and allows it stand so effortlessly, the quiet shading of characters and who they are beyond what they say, how bloody hard the writer worked for that sentence and that rhythm and clatter of syntax, the themes that lie in the folds of the story, the masterful appearance of simplicity.

In this age of information overload, when there are a zillion things to read online, toppling stacks of books by our bedside and shelves of books that have never been cracked, who has time for rereading? And why bother?

Because there is depth in return. And if you are someone who is interested in writing yourself, you will learn ten times more through the rereading of one beautiful book than in the reading of ten books only once.

And if you choose a book you love, it might also heal your heart.