Welcome to A True Life Built

This is for anyone, at any age, who is finding the courage to begin again.

A True Life Built is a living photo essay on starting over and building a truer life. As a society, we mark many traditional milestones but don’t often celebrate the courage it takes to make a change.

How It Begins

This story begins with an ending: after 17 years in a complicated relationship, I finally left. In 2020, as Covid closed in, I packed a single suitcase and got on a plane. I left behind a marriage, a home and a country, but I gained the chance to begin again.

In the single suitcase I carried from my old life to my new, I packed a single book: Upstream, by Mary Oliver, with the passage that lends this project its name:

“And now… that first world, that old house, is lost and sold, and the books I gathered there lost, or sold—but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built…

I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it. And I can do what I want with it. Live it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes.”

What I Write About

I write about grieving the life I left and the wild and wonderful journey of building a new one. It’s about shedding the ways I kept myself small and claiming my life for my own. My essays touch on four main topics.

Grief: Making peace with the past

The women I was

Relationships: Rebuilding friends, family and love in midlife.

Women without children

Work: Your job will never love you back.

Just work

Creativity: The simple joys of good food and gardens.

Cooking as connection

If you’d like to get essays only on a particular topic, like work, you can go here to manage your account. Under Notifications, toggle the green buttons “on” for just the topics you’re interested in and “off” for the others.

Join the Journey

One of the unexpected joys of starting over has been hearing from others on similar journeys. So if something resonates with you, I’d love it if you’d leave a comment, drop me an email or share a post with a friend!

About Liz

Liz is a writer and photographer based in Brooklyn.