Winner of the 2016 IAN Award for Outstanding Memoir and Runner-Up for Book of the Year.
How many times can you lose yourself in love before you finally learn how to choose yourself?
In Realizing River City, Melissa Grunow looks unflinchingly at the relationships that shaped her-and at the woman she became while searching for love, acceptance, and a place to belong. Through marriage, divorce, emotionally abusive relationships, grief, desire, and the painful repetition of old patterns, she confronts what happens when the need to be loved begins to eclipse the need to love yourself.
Written with vulnerability, candour, and a poet's eye for emotional detail, this memoir follows Grunow through the messy terrain between heartbreak and healing. Each loss forces another reckoning: with the stories she has told herself, the boundaries she has surrendered, and the difficult truth that escape alone does not end a destructive pattern.
Yet Realizing River City is not simply a catalogue of broken relationships. It is a story of self-discovery, compassion, resilience, and the gradual reclamation of a life. Grunow transforms anger and grief into understanding as she learns that redemption does not come from finding the right person to complete her.
Sometimes the relationship capable of changing everything is the one you build with yourself.