These aren’t necessarily books I agree with word for word or believe have all the answers. They’re books that found me at different points in my journey and gave me something I needed — a new perspective, language for what I was experiencing, a deeper understanding of myself, or simply permission to see life differently.
Some helped me heal. Some challenged me. Some helped me understand myself and my relationships. And some simply reminded me that life is meant to be lived.
This book helped me understand why I had so often felt unheard, unseen, and lonely in my marriage. It gave me a new lens for looking at my own relational needs — not as something that was wrong with me, but as something I needed to understand.
It helped me recognize what I need in relationships to feel connected, secure, and emotionally regulated.
This book helped me understand the importance of learning to love my single life.
I’ll be honest — there were parts of it I was incredibly resistant to at first. I wasn’t necessarily ready to hear everything it had to say. But after giving myself time to process it, I realized how spot-on so much of it was.
It helped me learn the difference between being alone and being lonely, and more importantly, how to build a life I genuinely enjoy even when I’m living it on my own.
This book changed my life.
It was deeply healing and, at times, incredibly hard to get through. As someone who identified with third-degree Mother Hunger, I felt seen and validated in ways I didn’t even know I needed.
It helped me understand parts of myself and my story with so much more compassion and clarity. But perhaps even more powerfully, it caused me to look at my own relationships with my children, who are now adults. It opened the door for conversations, reflection, accountability, and healing in those relationships as well.
That healing has been incredibly powerful and has helped me continue developing healthier relationships — not only with the people I love, but with myself.
I highly recommend this book.
Growing up in a religious, structured, and relatively small world, I inherited a lot of ideas about what it meant to be a woman. This book helped me begin defining womanhood for myself.
It completely shifted the paradigm for me around feminine energy, pleasure, desire, and what it means to fully inhabit and celebrate being a woman. It gave me permission to explore parts of myself that I hadn’t always known I was allowed to explore.
For me, this book was incredibly liberating. It helped expand my understanding of womanhood beyond the roles and expectations I had grown up with and opened the door to a much freer, more embodied version of myself.
Let’s be honest, it’s a great title — and always an attention grabber when you’re reading it at the local coffee shop.
But underneath the provocative title, this book helped me do some incredibly deep healing. It helped me begin making peace with the neglected little girl inside me who felt invisible — the little girl who experienced abandonment over and over again.
This book gave me a framework and a path forward for learning how to love her, protect her, and, maybe most importantly, listen to what she needs. Instead of abandoning those parts of myself, I began learning how to show up for them.
What started as a book with a fantastic title became a meaningful part of learning how to be there for myself.
I devoured this one.
It’s filled with great stories, life lessons, humor, and plenty of moments that just make you feel good.
I loved the inspiration I felt while reading it. It reminded me that sometimes the twists, turns, setbacks, and unexpected moments in life are all part of the story — and there can be something valuable to take from all of them.
This is a great book to pick up when you need a little encouragement, perspective, or simply something that leaves you feeling good about life.
You can read this book in about three hours — and I’ve read it at least five times. That should probably tell you something.
It’s biblically based, but I think it speaks especially well to people who are deeply spiritual and interested in ideas like the Law of Attraction and the spiritual laws that shape how we experience life.
I think of this book as a little how-to manual for living well. It’s simple, practical, easy to revisit, and somehow I seem to take away something different every time I read it.
This is one I keep coming back to.
I’ve followed Matthew Hussey for years, so I couldn’t wait to read this one.
In some ways, it reminds me of Single on Purpose, but Love Life takes the idea further by offering practical examples of how to actually build a life you love — how to expand your world, where to meet people, how to create connection, and how to stop putting your life on hold while waiting for a relationship.
The message that resonated most with me is something I’ve now experienced for myself: there is a huge difference between telling ourselves we love our life — or performing a life that looks full and happy — and genuinely loving the life we are living.
When we truly fall in love with the life we have now — not the life we imagine, fantasize about, or hope someone else will eventually give us — we become ready to expand that life with another person.
Until then, that’s the work:
I’m still making my way through this one, so I’ll come back and share my thoughts when I’m finished.
This is an evolving list. As I continue reading, healing, learning, questioning, and discovering, I’ll keep adding the books that leave something with me.