The House on Sunset
By- Lindsay Fischer
Genre- Memoir/Women’s Fiction
Lindsay Fischer was once a high school English teacher with dreams stretching far outside the classroom. When her boyfriend of a year-and-a-half cheated on her, Lindsay found herself alone, looking online for a replacement. His name was Mike.
That’s where the nightmare started.
The House on Sunset is a memoir, a collection of reminiscences, scattering the ashes of two broken homes and putting them to rest. Each chapter offers a different glimpse inside the cycle of intimate partner violence, where honeymoon phases and traumas coexist.
Everyone could fall victim to abusers. This book bravely displays the reasons a quirky, twenty-something teacher would, and did.
GUEST POST
Your favorite part of being an author
There’s magic in authorship: a checkmark on the bucket list, a tangible product to hold and say, “this is mine,” the memories of creating, sweating over word choice and waking up in the middle of the night with a “oh shit, that’s it” moment.
But my favorite part of authorship has to be giving a voice to the voiceless.
Writing a memoir about domestic violence brings serious complications while you’re trying to recover. I assume these are things every author faces: the fear of vulnerability, the remembrances of times gone by (that shaped the story you’re telling), the cutting into old scars one final time (so they can finally heal). But when you’ve faced a life-changing trauma, there’s danger in those things: recovery one flashback away from PTSD resurfacing.
Once I figured out how to cope when I was triggered, the writing process became a form of narrative healing. I learned when my limits were nearby, when to break from a creative session (for self-care practices) and - most importantly - when my ovaries became steel.
Little by little the writing process taught me about who I used to be, who I was then and who I wanted to become.
Putting words out into the world is a very brave thing to do for anyone. As any writer will tell you, someone is going to hate what you write. Waiting for that moment, the rejection, is self-inflicted punishment. So pushing the publish button permits this penalty to happen.
Facing those fears and doing it anyway is absolutely what changed me, pushed me further into advocacy work and pushed me to become the person I never knew I wanted to be.
This journey isn’t easy. It can be downright painful and lonely and inexplicably frustrating, but it’s worth it. To know you’ll change someone’s life, make them question something they’ve never faced (or something they’ve avoided), is a beautiful gift. Maybe one of the best gifts I’ve ever been given.
And I gave it to myself.
Self-love? It’s a part of authorship. It’s also a part of what I was missing as a trauma and domestic violence survivor.
But I gave it back to myself the day I released The House on Sunset.
About the Author
Lindsay Fischer graduated from Missouri State University with a Bachelor of Science in secondary education, English. An avid reader and learner, Lindsay took her passion for words into a classroom before starting a writing career. Life pulled her from the classroom, providing an opportunity to use her voice against domestic violence, blogging under the pseudonym, Sarafina Bianco, since 2009. You can find her words at survivorswillbeheard.com and speak directly to her when she hosts #domesticviolencechat on Twitter. Lindsay hopes to be an advocate for women, men and children who still live inside the nightmare of their abuse. She currently lives with her husband and three dogs, including Watson, in St. Louis, Missouri.
Links-
Facebook: www.facebook.com/survivorswillbeheard
Twitter: @LinsFischer
Author Site: survivorswillbeheard.com
Instagram: @lindsaycapo
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