Available Now!
Available Now!
Healing and growth happen in the strangest places . . .
Spanning three years of her life, Grace Hayden's memoir, Fish Food: A Feminist Moby Dick, documents her recovery from trauma involving love and loss. Unable to medicate childhood wounds with alcohol and drugs, Hayden grapples with sex addiction as an obstacle to finding the love and peace she craves. Like Ahab's wounding by the white whale, Hayden humanizes the healing journey, transforming the pain that lingers just below the surface. For her, fly-fishing for muskie in Minnesota and Wisconsin is what allowed her to reconnect with her authentic self; the waters she fished provided transformation. This book—moving, honest, and humorous—is an invitation to follow your bliss.
From the Author:
When I was in my dark night of the soul, facing the lingering debris of shame we all carry in the recesses of our being, and wanting to transform and transcend past pain, I looked for inspirational stories. I didn’t find any that spoke honestly and to the average person’s life; they all had fairytale endings which do not happen to most of us. So, I decided to write my own. In the basement of an abandoned farmhouse, I saw this quote tacked onto a support beam. It animates the core of my philosophy as a writer:
It is not what we show off but what we hide away that tells our truest stories.
-Anonymous
Praise for Fish Food: A Feminist Moby Dick
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“Grace Hayden's 'Fish Food' is a story of love and loss, the journey at one woman overcoming generational cycles of brokenness and addiction. But along the path to healing, Grace must overcome a new addiction -men and sex and BDSM- in order to finally become unapologetically herself and fulfill her dream of becoming a fly-fishing guide. This is a moving, sometimes funny, sometimes oh-please- don’t-do-that memoir of one woman finally learning to love herself.”
Kate Hopper, author of Ready for Air and Use Your Words
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“Full of place, philosophy, food, sex, spirits and healing-not that kind of feel good miracle of healing, but the catch and release of life. This is the story of work.“
Heid E. Erdrich, author of Little Big Bully and granddaughter of butchers from Little Falls, Minnesota
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“Humorous, heartfelt, and achingly honest, Grace Hayden’s memoir, Fish Food, recounts the story of her journey from the lost little girl to the self-realized women through authentic stories and potent language. Part spirit quest, part congestion, at times both tragic and comic, Hayden confidently leads us to places in the river only she can go and plumbs the depths to revel many hidden truths and treasures.”
John Matthew Gillen, author of American Blasphemer: A Novel
Excerpt from Fish Food
I have never forgotten how that first strike felt when she hit my lure—a hot line of connection from my hands and arms into my head and down to my chest. Some sort of circuit board lit up that night, getting seared into my memory.
Only years later in light of that relationship between myself and the musky, between the hunter and the hunted, between the absent father and the child left behind, desire resurfaced as a wound, did I finally understand that in order to heal I would have to return to the source of my loss and longing, to the initial cut of having that rod, reel, and lure ripped from my hands.
Buy Fish Food
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Buy Fish Food ⋆
If you enjoyed reading Fish Food: A Feminist Moby Dick, don’t forget to leave a review on Amazon!
Grace’s Services
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Grace can assist with consulting, coaching, or ghost writing as well as work on developmental editing and provide critiques of manuscripts.
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Grace offers guided fishing float trips for conventional or fly fishing in Minnesota between June 15-October 15.
Interested in connecting with Grace about her writing or guided float trip services? Click “Inquire” below!
