ST. GEORGE, UT, January 4, 2021
A church-going Rhode Island mother is shattered when she loses her only daughter to a fatal overdose. Against the advice of family and friends, the mother mines her daughter’s journals to try to understand what might have happened. In the process, she learns more than she expected about her daughter, herself, and her faith.
Carolyn DiPasquale’s memoir, Reckless Grace, recently acquired by WiDo Publishing’s imprint E.L. Marker, is a story of mutual loss and discovery. Central to the memoir are Rachel’s journals: twenty volumes written over eleven years. In them, Rachel recorded in agonizing detail her struggle with a pernicious eating disorder, diabulimia, unique to people with type 1 diabetes, as well as an untreated mental illness and its relationship to substance abuse. Journaling was Rachel’s way of making sense of the illnesses which tortured her and ultimately took her life. Her diaries are the power and pulse of DiPasquale’s book.
Reckless Grace is more than Go Ask Alice for millennials. It is also an indictment of those in the medical profession who ignore or dismiss warning signs of mental illness. DiPasquale also doesn’t hesitate to explore her own parental failings and how they might have contributed to Rachel’s struggles. The real offender, in DiPasquale’s view, is ignorance, and it is ignorance she fights with passion born of tragic experience.
DiPasquale’s memoir surprises, enlightens, and empowers. “I never really knew my daughter until she passed away,” says DiPasquale. “If Reckless Grace can spare one parent from that fate, or light the way for one young person in Rachel’s circumstance, it will have been a success.”
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Carolyn DiPasquale has taught writing and literature at various New England colleges. She is an active member of the professional writing group, Newport Round Table. She resides in Richmond, Rhode Island with her husband, Phil. When she is not writing books, chain reading good literature, or doting on her two-year-old granddaughter, she volunteers at the New Hope Chapel Food Pantry.
To learn more visit www.recklessgracestory.com