Reaching for Beautiful

A Memoir of Loving and Losing a Wild Child

By: Sally McQuillen

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Paperback | 1 April 2025

At a Glance

Paperback
248 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.59 x 13.97 x 2.03

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For fans of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking or David Sheff’s Beautiful Boy, this debut memoir about a mother grieving her young-adult son’s death is a must-read for any parent who has lost a child or whose child struggles with addiction.

A luminous story of how love triumphs over pain, love transcends fear, and love never dies; this debut memoir from a mother grieving her young-adult son’s death is a must-read for any parent who has lost a child, is raising a child from the edge of their seat, or whose family struggles with addiction.

When Sally’s twenty-one-year-old son died in a boat accident, her greatest fear is realized. Christopher was often drawn to risk and struggled with addiction. In this riveting memoir, Sally captures the wild ride of his jam-packed life and her deep love for him while reflecting on her own childhood and family’s legacy of alcoholism.

Sally shares insights about what it’s like to experience the emotional aftershocks of acute grief, filtered through the lens of her personal experience as a mother and her professional vantage point as a psychotherapist. Even if they have not been touched by loss in this way, readers may see themselves in Sally’s bittersweet illusion of trying to keep her son safe, in how she is challenged to let go of her fear, guilt, and regret in order to forgive herself, and in the ways grief teaches her about the power of love.

Industry Reviews

“The most enduring books write us and touch on the common human journey. Reaching for Beautiful is such a book. What Sally McQuillen endured in bringing a child into the world only to lose him decades later holds lessons for us all. Her brave and tender story will make any reader value life and our chance to be here more.”—Mark Nepo, author of You Don’t Have to Do It Alone and The Half-Life of Angels

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