Author Event! Leslie Johansen Nack & Anastasia Zadeik

About the book:

For fans of Suzanne Heywood’s Wavewalker and Cea Sunrise Person’s North of Normal comes Leslie Johansen Nack’s emotional follow-up memoir about her battle with addiction following a traumatic childhood—and her inspiring journey toward healing and happiness.

In the mid-1970s, Leslie Nack’s family returned from sailing to French Polynesia and began the integration process into American life again, which included being tossed back and forth between an alcoholic, mentally ill mother and an abusive, overbearing father.To find love and acceptance, Leslie chases a myth that throws her into the path of nefarious older men, where she eventually falls into drug and alcohol addiction. Her father dies in his plane in the jungles of Mexico when Leslie is nineteen, but his abuse lingers in her psyche. She spirals, her only solace her next fix—until, somehow, she finds the grace, despite her abjectly dysfunctional family background, to believe in her worth. This newfound self-love changes everything for her, and finally she is able to find her way to sobriety and recovery.Raw and intense but ultimately hopeful, this sequel to the popular memoir Fourteen tells the rest of Nack’s turbulent—and incredible—story.

About the authors:

Leslie Johansen Nack is the author of two award-winning books Fourteen: A Daughter’s Memoir of Adventure, Sailing and Survival, and The Blue Butterfly: A Novel of Marion Davies. Her forthcoming sequel, Nineteen: A Daughter’s Memoir of Reckoning and Recovery, finishes Leslie's angsty and challenging story with sobriety and hope for the future. She graduated from UCLA with a degree in English Literature and overcame past traumas to raise two children in a healthy, loving home. She is a member of The Authors’ Guild, The Historical Novel Society and the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Assn. She lives outside Seattle with her husband of 35 years.

Anastasia Zadeik is the author of two novels. Her debut, Blurred Fates was awarded both the 2023 Sarton Award and National Indie Excellence Award for contemporary fiction. Her second novel, The Other Side of Nothing, called “a stunning story of mental illness and its challenges,” by Kirkus, was selected as a 2024 Zibby Summer Read and awarded the 2024 IPPY Gold Medal for Popular Fiction. Anastasia serves as Director of Programming for the San Diego Writers Festival, on the board of the International Memoir Association, and as a mentor and performer for the literary nonprofit So Say We All.

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