Boundless: A road trip to rejuvenation

A new memoir from acclaimed author and journalist Carolyn Dawn Flynn

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AUSTIN, TEXAS — When you have become no one, how do you become someone again? That is the big question for author and magazine journalist Carolyn Dawn Flynn, a single mother of twins, as she faces the impending empty nest and the death-spiral of the newspaper industry in Boundless (Atmosphere Press). In Boundless, Flynn’s eighth book, she turns her keen insight and signature poetic voice to the deeper questions about the stages of women’s lives as she faces the hard stop of motherhood. The book is a stand-alone manifesto for Chapter Two wise womanhood and serves as a sequel for those who followed Flynn’s column in Sage Magazine in the Albuquerque Journal, which at its height had 425,000 readers.

In eight weeks, two-thirds of my family would leave at once,” Flynn says. “As a curious journalist and creative literary writer, I was experiencing a colossal failure of the imagination about my future.” This sets her on a collision course where her journalistic values and feminist views collide with the economic fragility of print journalism.

Boundless is a re-imagining of the empty nest. “This isn’t just the life passage ahead of the stage before death,” Flynn says, “but rather the recovery of a new form of youthfulness. To reinvent ourselves, we must reclaim our emotional agility.”

At times poignant, at times tragi-comic, Boundless is relentless in its pursuit of the question of what is a self, why do we need one and how do we reawaken one. Set at the intersection of the twins’ coming-of-age narrative and Flynn’s vanishing horizon of middle age, it is a story of becoming. "It came down to this," Flynn says, "I am words. I am a voice."

BOUNDLESS has been longlisted for the 2021 Mslexia Memoir Prize, and its opening pages were longlisted for the 2022 First Pages Prize. An early essay about the near-miss with death of her baby twins appeared in Fourth Genre.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Memoirist, novelist and essayist Carolyn Dawn Flynn is the author of the memoir Boundless and seven books of nonfiction. Her work has been published in Fourth Genre, Under the Gum Tree, Arts and Letters, The Colorado Sun, The Tampa Review, The Whitefish Review (Montana Prize for Fiction), Albuquerque Journal, Sage Magazine, Albuquerque the Magazine and Wilde Frauen. She is a single mother of Ukrainian-Irish-American twins and was the longtime editor of a life-giving magazine called Sage.


EARLY PRAISE FROM REVIEWERS

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.”

– Erica Ball, Independent Book Review

"I found her honesty to be a welcome invitation into the turmoil of the balancing act she was repeatedly faced with and I was able to connect with so much of what she shared on a level that I have not been able to do with other memoirs I’ve read. I think it will be the moments of disorganization and pervading emotional fights that readers will be most heartened by, as this is when her resilience shines the brightest. Flynn’s authenticity in the throes of both tenderness and frustration makes her memoir a powerful testament to the greatest prize of all: the reward of meaningful personal transformation."

– Jamie Michele, Reader's Favorite






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