Always Yours, Bee: From accident to affair to the ever after

Review
A BookBub selection for "15 Powerful Memoirs to Read in 2021." --"Mia Hayes has penned an emotionally charged memoir that details her life after her husband suffered a traumatic brain injury in atraffic accident...as Hayes rebuilds her life and relationship, her touching, powerful memoir sends a message to anyonedealing with pain: keep going."
On a rainy November day, Mia Hayes' husband left for work on his Vespa. Normally, she would have driven him, but Mia was waiting on a phone call with an editor and didn't have time.She never saw that caring, loving version of her husband again. The fallout from his accident--Mia's guilt and her husband's PTSD, memory loss, and depression--consumed their lives over the next five years as her laid-back husband changed into an angry man with few memories of their past. Desperate to hold her fragile family together, Mia ignored her own unraveling and plunged into bipolar depression.As she searched for answers to unanswerable questions, Mia moved her family from San Francisco to Paris, France before landing in a leafy Washington, D.C. suburb where she tried to find a fresh start only to become embroiled in a scandal of her own making.Through ups and downs, mental illness and bad decisions, Mia struggled with what it means to be a good wife and mother, whether saving her marriage was worth the pain, and understanding that healing is a personal journey.Always Yours, Bee is a heartbreaking yet triumphant and brave look at a woman, a marriage, and a family falling apart and coming out stronger. Told with clarity and introspection, it captures the terror of losing the person closest to you--yourself.
From the Author
Unlike my other books, Always Yours, Bee is a memoir. As I draw heavily on my life experiences to write my novels, you may see similar situations in my books and this memoir.
To write this book, I relied heavily on my and my husband's Facebook posts, our family photographs, my blog entries (that I've since deleted), the legal documents, my family, and my admittedly flawed memory. It is important to note that when writing about events pertaining to my immediate family, I did inquire about their differing memories of the same situations, and I used these blended recollections to better flesh out what actually happened.
I have changed the names of all the individuals in this book, and in some situations, I obscured details to preserve anonymity. I have also created composite characters in the case of my friends, as writing about every friend individually would become unwieldy. Any event and person I felt did not contribute to the substance of the story, I omitted.
While writing this memoir, I learned the stories I told myself publicly and privately were more complicated than I realized. I've attempted to be truthful with myself, even when that truth was ugly, and I believe I've written the truest form of my story and memories that I can.
From the Inside Flap
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
November 2004
Lemonade light filtered through the fog, casting a warm, golden tone across us as we watched Ryan run down the empty beach, a kite string clenched in his tiny fist.
November usually brought rain to San Francisco, but this particular day was clear, and we wanted to take advantage of the sun--even if it was chilly and damp out. Surfers bobbed off the coast, waiting for their ride, and gulls skittered along the shoreline. Later, after we ate our picnic lunch, we planned on exploring the tide pools.
James snapped a picture of Leo and me snuggled into a fleecy blanket. I waved him over to us, and he settled into the sand, his jean-clad leg touching mine. He tossed his arm over my shoulder and hugged me close."This is nice," he said. Ryan had stopped running to inspect something on the beach, and Leo crawled off my lap into the sand. "But this is more fun." James turned and tried to tickle me through my layers of bulky clothes.
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