Every book begins with a belief most of us have never questioned.
Every book ends with a new way of seeing it.
What I Thought Love Required
Some beliefs arrive quietly.
Be useful.
Be agreeable.
Need less.
Carry more.
Hold it together.
We absorb them before we are old enough to question them. Then we build relationships, families, careers, and entire lives around them and call it love.
Jesse Sloane became very good at being what other people needed. She learned how to anticipate problems, carry responsibility, forgive quickly, work harder, and ask for very little in return. From the outside, these qualities looked like strength, loyalty, and ambition.
Often, they were.
But they also taught her to measure love by how much she was willing to give away.
What I Thought Love Required follows Jesse through childhood, marriage, heartbreak, single motherhood, professional success, and burnout as she begins examining the invisible beliefs that shaped the way she loved and allowed herself to be loved.
This is not a story about villains. It is not a guide to finding the perfect relationship or a celebration of walking away from everyone who disappoints you. It is an honest look at the adaptations that once helped us belong and what happens when those same adaptations begin costing us our peace, our boundaries, and our sense of self.
With warmth, humor, and hard-won perspective, Jesse explores the difference between being needed and being loved, between keeping the peace and actually feeling peaceful, and between giving freely and slowly disappearing beneath everything you carry.
If you have spent years being dependable, capable, and easy to love while quietly wondering why you still felt unseen, this story may feel uncomfortably familiar.
What I Thought Love Required is not about learning how to love less.
It is about discovering that love was never supposed to require your disappearance.
You were not broken.
You adapted.
There is a difference.
“For one of the first times, I felt seen.”
Jamie Michele · Readers’ Favorite · ★★★★★
“Like talking to a friend who admits they don’t have it all figured out.”
Doreen Chombu · Readers’ Favorite · ★★★★★
Available Now
Want a sneak peek first? Start with Chapter One.
What I Thought Loss Meant
The Things I Couldn't Keep. The Life That Remained.
Most people think loss begins with goodbye.
A phone call. A funeral. A packed suitcase. A final breath.
But loss has been shaping us long before we recognize its name.
Sometimes it arrives as a move that takes us away from everything familiar. A friendship that quietly ends. A future that becomes impossible. A child who grows up. A career that disappears. A version of ourselves we can no longer return to.
Sometimes nothing has ended at all.
Something has simply changed.
What I Thought Loss Meant follows Jesse Sloane through childhood goodbyes, fractured friendships, abandoned dreams, parenthood, death, professional collapse, and the quieter losses that arrive without funerals or sympathy cards.
Some losses are obvious enough to be witnessed. Others leave us wondering whether we are allowed to grieve them at all.
With honesty, tenderness, and hard-won perspective, Jesse explores what remains after people leave, plans change, and the lives we expected are replaced by lives we never imagined. She examines the objects we keep, the memories we revisit, and the people who continue shaping us long after they are no longer beside us.
This is not a book about getting over loss. It does not offer a timeline for grief or turn every painful ending into an inspirational lesson.
It is an intimate look at the ways loss changes us, the ordinary process of continuing, and the complicated truth that moving forward does not require leaving everything behind.
If certain people, places, dreams, or versions of yourself still live quietly inside you, this story may feel familiar.
What you have been carrying may not be only grief.
It might also be love.
“Readers who enjoy memoirs about how love survives change will be genuinely touched by this book.”
Jamie Michele · Readers’ Favorite · ★★★★★
“It’s one of those memoirs that will stay with you always.”
Kamil Wróbel · Readers’ Favorite · ★★★★★
Coming October 2026
Want a sneak peek first? Start with Chapter One.
What I Thought Joy Was
What I Was Waiting For. The Life That Was Already Happening.
Jesse Sloane spent decades building things. A career. A family. Businesses. A life she was proud of. Along the way, she became very good at being responsible, productive, and prepared. She finished the work before resting, saved the beautiful things for special occasions, and waited for everyone else to be okay before giving herself permission to enjoy what she had created.
The problem was that the work was never finished.
There was always another decision to make, another person who needed something, another goal to reach, or another version of life waiting just beyond the current one.
Meanwhile, joy kept interrupting.
It appeared in expensive candles she was afraid to burn, good towels nobody used, a shimmering dress that traveled to three events without leaving its protective covering, and a factory-wide water-gun fight that accomplished absolutely nothing.
It arrived through grandchildren, ridiculous photographs, ordinary Tuesdays, ice cream for dinner, laughter that hurt, and moments that were over before she understood how much they mattered.
In What I Thought Joy Was, Jesse turns her honest, humorous gaze toward the rules that kept her postponing pleasure, protecting beautiful things, avoiding attention, and treating rest as something that required justification.
What she finds is not a formula for permanent happiness. Joy does not erase grief, responsibility, guilt, uncertainty, or the difficult realities of other people’s lives. It does not promise to stay simply because we finally noticed it.
Sometimes joy is enormous. Sometimes it lasts only a moment.
That does not make it less true.
Warm, funny, and deeply human, What I Thought Joy Was is for anyone who has spent years building a life they are proud of while quietly waiting for the right time to enjoy it.
The life Jesse was waiting for did not arrive with an announcement.
It was already happening.
Coming December 2026