Fragments - Paperback

by Magdalena Stevens (Author), Ashe Stevens (Author)

A poetic love story about identity, healing, and falling in love with the parts of ourselves we were taught to hide.

Lena Hartley was a runway star in her youth. Now, she's a doctor. Her beautiful mind has always made sense of the world by observing, feeling, and analyzing first, participating second. She never questioned the way she was-until now, at the age of forty-two.

As she sits in a psychiatrist's office, the past she tried to bury splits open like an overstuffed valise of memories.

First there is Paris. The flashing cameras. The cramped apartment of fashion models. The toxic relationship. Crumbling under pressure, Lena chooses to leave this glamorous life behind and start again-from scratch.

Newly single and working in a bar to fund her studies, Lena is feeling adrift-when a chance follow on MySpace changes everything. Enter Phoenix: a gorgeous, talented artist, who sees the true Lena-but is also haunted by a traumatic past.

Their love story blossoms through poetic text messages and California landscapes into a connection that feels healing, passionate...and most of all, mystically fated.

Years later, when their young daughter, Ruby, is diagnosed with autism, Lena begins to see the world differently. In Ruby's eyes, she recognizes something familiar, and starts to piece together the fragments of her own identity.

Told in lyrical flashbacks during one extraordinary psychiatric evaluation, Fragments is an emotionally raw story of love that nurtures, not destroys-and the messy, beautiful process of self-discovery.

For anyone who's ever felt like too much-or not enough.

(Bring tissues.)