Coming soon…
What if the real injury isn’t abandonment but being denied the right to mourn?
Where grief refuses to be tidy
In her upcoming memoir, My Name Was Michelle, Leanne Matton shares her deeply personal experience of forced adoption and the trauma that ensued. This is the story of what happens after the harm is done and life keeps demanding to be lived. Here, the lost things don’t stay politely buried. They call out from the depths like wind through a broken window. This is a story of longing, loss, survival and the slow reclamation of identity.
Beneath the myths
In My Name Was Michelle, Leanne looks at who gets to grieve and who must simply deny their losses and move on. For anyone who has been told to be grateful and urged to become more resilient to harm, these pages are both a lantern and a quiet rebellion. There’s no demand for inspiration or redemption here, only the truth of what it means to be harmed in a way that cannot be undone.
The slow reclamation
Through the lens of forced adoption and developmental trauma, Leanne dismantles societal myths to reveal what is lost beneath the demand for inspirational survival and celebration of our scars. Sentence by sentence, this is the kind of narrative that lingers where authentic living is built around the bruises rather than denying their existence.
Want to follow along as the memoir comes together and finds its way out into the world?
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