Essays

Relationships that never leave you.

About Fight School,
the book

“Pain is the best teacher, but no one wants to take his class.”

  General Choi, founder Taekwondo

Fight School, explores how women handle conflict: a personal exploration of strife, rebirth, and uppercuts.

My husband and I owned an award-winning ad agency together, our lives fused by creativity. He was the visionary, I the ballast. But he unraveled with bipolar disorder, tearing apart our business and family. As refuge, I took up taekwondo and poured my rage into martial arts. I couldn’t win an argument with my husband, but I could take a blow to the head. It was only through the rough exchange of flesh and feeling that I summoned the courage to speak. I became fearless.

Fight School joins the conversations of divorce, love and choices in Splinters by Leslie Jamison, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, by Maggie Smith and, most poignantly, by In Love from Amy Bloom. And it introduces new ideas of how to channel our inchoate feelings into action. What battles should we choose; when and how should we fight for independence and our families, and when should we let go, despite love?