Author Description

Across continents, cultures, and the shifting architecture of a childhood built inside other people's decisions, she learned early that love often arrived in the form of vigilance, that competence could be mistaken for worth, and that attention-small, precise, fiercely tender-was its own kind of inheritance. From the villas of Dubai to Ohio winters, from the ritual-rich summers of Sag Harbor to the deserts of Jordan and Kenya, the story moves through a world where rooms change faster than the people inside them. Along the way, our protagonist becomes an expert at reading atmospheres, at anticipating what others need before they ask, at holding the center when the adults around her cannot. But when tragedy reshapes the terrain of her young adulthood, she is forced to confront the systems she built to survive-and to ask whether a life engineered for usefulness can still hold space for joy, mercy, hunger, and selfhood. Written with the precision of a poet and the emotional intelligence of a life hard-earned, Impermanence is a meditation on belonging and departure, resilience and tenderness, and the rooms we carry long after we've left them. It is a memoir about learning to step through the door as yourself-and discovering what remains.