Cracked Open: A Memoir: Love, Loss and Becoming

CRACKED OPEN: Love, Loss, and Becoming What happens when the life you've spent decades building suddenly falls apart? For most of her life, Michelle Cooper believed strength was the answer. Childhood trauma taught her to survive. Grit and determination enabled her to succeed. She built a career that carried her from engineering roots to the executive ranks of a Fortune 50 company. She became the woman who could handle anything—the leader, the achiever, the strong one. Then she fell in love. For the first time, the armor she had worn for decades began to crack. Through unconditional love, Michelle discovered parts of herself she never knew existed beneath the performance, perfectionism, and relentless drive to prove her worth. Then the unimaginable happened. In 2021, Michelle's husband, Bill, died at just fifty years old. Grief shattered more than her heart. It dismantled the identities she had spent a lifetime constructing. Without the roles that had defined her—wife, executive, caregiver, achiever—she was forced to confront a question many of us eventually face: Who am I when everything I was is gone? Cracked Open is a deeply personal and unflinchingly honest memoir about childhood trauma, ambition, marriage, betrayal, caregiving, faith, corporate leadership, widowhood, and the courage required to begin again. But at its heart, this is not a story about loss. It is a story about becoming. With vulnerability, wisdom, and hard-earned insight, Michelle invites readers into a journey from survival to success to surrender—and ultimately toward a more authentic life. Through reflection questions at the end of each chapter, readers are encouraged to examine their own armor, uncover the stories that shaped them, and consider what it might mean to live more freely. If you have ever experienced grief, reinvention, burnout, heartbreak, identity shifts, or the feeling that the life you've built no longer fits, this book will remind you that you are not alone. We do not choose every breaking. But we can choose what comes next. You are not finished. You are becoming.
ASIN: B0H4HCYVT7
VSKU: BVV.B0H4HCYVT7.VG
Condition: Very Good
Author/Artist:Cooper, Michelle Mapp
Binding: Paperback
Note: Any images shown are stock photographs and product may differ from what is shown.
Condition Notes: Book has little sign of wear or use