The Possibility of Everything is my fifth book, though it's my first book-length memoir. It represents the kind of writing I did in graduate school at the University of Iowa, where I was a student in the Nonfiction Writing Program just when the term "creative nonfiction" was coming into vogue. Before that, I'd been trained as a reporter and editor at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, and worked as a magazine editor in Knoxville, Tennessee. If three years on the edge of Appalachia don't give you a fast lesson in what you're really made of, then hell: I don't know what will.

When I left graduate school in 1992, I headed back home to New York to write my first book, an examination of the lifelong effects of early mother loss. The writing grew out of my own life experience, having lost my mother to breast cancer just after I turned seventeen. That book was Motherless Daughters, which was published in 1994 and became an international bestseller that brought me all over the world as a writer and speaker. Three more books followed, including Motherless Mothers in 2006. I've also written numerous essays, articles and reviews over the years, and have been a contributor to close to a dozen anthologies. Some of my favorites have been The Bitch in the House, Toddler, Blindsided By a Diaper, and Behind the Bedroom Door.

The Possibility of Everything grew out of a family trip my husband, daughter, and I took to Belize in 2000. I've since gone back to Central America four times to research and fact-check the book, traveling throughout Belize and into northern Guatemala. In the process I've met some extraordinary people, and had my belief system cracked upon and reassembled several times by people whose understanding of the workings of the cosmos far surpass mine.

Most of the year I live outside of Los Angeles with my husband, two daughters, and a growing menagerie of beloved pets. You can also find me every July in Iowa City, where I teach in the summer writing festival and never miss the Johnson County Fair. I'm a New Yorker by birth, a Californian by circumstance, but a Midwesterner at heart.

hopeedelman.com

Order the Book: