A new book to help you write the hard stories

Brave the Page: How Writing Our Hard Stories Brings Healing and Wholeness by Megan Febuary was released in June 2025 (Baker Books).

While many of my clients come to me wanting to undertake personal history interviews to capture their stories, others endeavor to write their stories themselves—with a little help. In those instances, I act as a memoir coach, meeting them at whatever stage they are currently at by providing guidance, support, and editing. When their stories delve into traumatic experiences from their past, we inevitably have to slow things down and focus as much on self-care as on the writing. That often comes as a surprise to them.

Writing hard stories is…well, hard. But as Megan Febuary puts forth in her new book, Brave the Page (Baker Books, June 2025), doing so may also bring healing and wholeness.

Inside “Brave the Page”

In Brave the Page, Febuary shares more than once that “story healing,” as she calls it, has nothing to do with being a writer—rather, “it is about paying attention to the stories within and digging into the deep questions that our stories ask of us.” Sound scary? It can—and perhaps, should—be: Going deep and writing about trauma will inevitably make one feel some of that trauma again; as the title of her book suggests, you’ll need to be brave.

What Febuary offers up in this book is a whole lot of support. That support takes the form of:

• inspiring personal stories

• research-driven approaches to self-care and trauma-focused writing

• gentle encouragement (including a mantra at the beginning of each chapter)

• and plenty of guidance (the writing prompts are generative and clear, and will certainly get your pen moving across the page).

There are moments in the book where, if you haven’t been in therapy, you may feel thrown by some of the psychology jargon (attachment styles, inner child healing, trauma responses)—but don’t be put off by this. In every instance that the author describes the rationale behind her approach to story healing, she (a) footnotes her references if you’d like to dig further; and (b) perhaps more importantly, describes how these concepts have played out in her own life and writing. There is an autobiographical bent to the book that lays the foundation for all the guidance and writing prompts that follow.

Are you ready to write about your trauma?

Febuary is deeply knowledgable about writing about trauma. She has journaled since her youth and braved the page quite literally when she began putting words to her shame around a childhood diagnosis of scleroderma, and later to abuse she suffered as a girl and sexual violence as an adult. She earned her master’s degree at a school that specialized in narrative-focused trauma care, and she “researched the body as storyteller, learning how it becomes the gatekeeper for the stories too tender to address until we are emotionally available for them.”

Brave the Page, I hope, will help you know when you are emotionally available for your own hard stories, as well as how to support yourself and heal while doing so. It will teach you how to be a “compassionate witness to your life” and to feel safe while doing the tender work of probing your memories.

Do you feel like you need permission to write about your challenges? Permission to put words to your feelings of shame? Permission to claim your story as your own? Permission to go slow—to unbury memories that have been long hidden, but at your own pace? You’ll find all that permission and more here.

Your story is not finished. It is ever-evolving, and writing about it, Febuary describes, is a “spiritual progression.”

And you must keep at it, even when it feels hard. “This work of using our voices,” she writes, “is a muscle we must train, and it becomes stronger each time we do it.”

Megan Febuary and I are in agreement: Writing through your trauma will be hard—but it will also be transformational. I recommend picking up a copy of her book to be your companion on your personal story healing journey. And she hopes that your copy will be well-loved and visibly used: “May [it] be dog-eared and highlighted, may its pages be torn out and posted as reminders, and may its edges be filled with your own brave reflections.” Mine is.

So, go forth and find your voice…and be gentle with yourself on the way ❤️

P.S. If something about this post stirred you, but you don’t feel quite ready to “brave the page,” I implore you to buy the book anyway. In my opinion, YOU are exactly who this book is for. Let it sit on your bedside table for a year if you must. Once you dip into it, those stirrings will become stronger, and so will your resolve to give voice to your memories and to put pen to paper. Let Megan Febuary plant the seeds; you will sow them when you are ready.

Note: This is an unsolicited review of a book I purchased at full price. I did not receive any compensation or free products in exchange, and any endorsements within this post are my own.