Boundless
by Carolyn Dawn Flynn
Genre: Memoir
ISBN: 9798891324824
Print Length: 324 pages
Publisher: Atmosphere Press
Reviewed by Erica Ball
An emotionally charged, beauty-filled memoir of emotion and identity at a time of massive change
One day, Carolyn Dawn Flynn’s life fell apart. She saw it coming—well, some of it.
The single mother of teenage twins, she knows their last year of high school will be challenging. And she knows that she needs to prepare for the reality of an empty nest. With her career as a journalist insufficient for financing the education of the twins’ dreams, Flynn decides to chase a new life of her own, accepting a high-paying job across the country.
This means that, in the same span of time that Flynn is helping her kids choose their college and future and navigate their transition to adulthood, she is also repairing and packing up their family home and juggling the logistics of all three relocations. She understands all this going in. What she doesn’t know is that her decision to move sets off a series of events that will unravel her sense of self and push her to the brink.
It sets her off on a quest the size of which she could never have anticipated. Not long after arriving in what is supposed to be her new home, Flynn finds herself embroiled in a toxic situation not of her own making. Despite valiant efforts on her part, she is set adrift, cut loose from the only tether tying her to a particular place.
With unpacked boxes and a scattered family, living for the first time in decades without children or a job to fill her days, Flynn’s questions of identity, place, and future spiral out of control. The sheer number of decisions facing her is overwhelming. When nowhere is home, where do you go? The terrifying limitlessness of the future stops her in her tracks.
Such disruptive times inevitably force us to look back, so Flynn also must contend with memories and feelings she’d long held in check. She remembers the traumatic day her twins almost died and after which she was acutely aware of the delicate balance that keeps life moving forward. She remembers the beginning of the verbal abuse of her now ex-husband, which he continues to inflict on her and which she knows she needs to address. She remembers her beloved mother, whose dining room set they had to part with for Flynn to make this move—one that might be for nothing.
Luckily, she has tools to draw on. A long-time practitioner of mindful meditation, she relies on those teachings as well as her explorations of faith to direct her search for answers on the priorities of living and where to focus energies. She also draws on long and deep conversations from her support system of friends and family to sort out her thoughts. And she writes.
With poetic phrasing featuring vivid descriptions of the sights, sounds, and smells of the places she finds herself in, Flynn criss-crosses the country from Albuquerque, New Mexico to Saratoga Springs, New York, dealing with the many unresolved items still on her to-do list. As vivid is the author’s inner life as she is forced to face her darkest emotions and desperate moments.
With the author’s immense skill at exploring these deep inner worlds, this memoir is highly recommended for those who have found themselves at a crossroads in their identity, living situation, career, family, or relationships, which will likely be almost everybody. It will especially resonate with caretakers and parents who have automatically given their all to others and maybe lost a little of themselves in the process.
Boundless is not just a story of a life in transition. It is also a hero’s journey out of the everyday world into one that questions everything from the necessity of material goods to the purpose of human life itself. With only her relationships to guide her through this transience and to transcendence, Flynn journeys into the darkness of the unknown and back to life again. But, of course, even when back again, everything has changed. In the end, it is about how we need never stop reinventing ourselves. And that a coming of age can happen at any point in the long years of a life.
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