About — Laura Ege
I write about the women we secretly are — the ones underneath the roles we’ve been handed, the stories we’ve been told about ourselves, the identities we quietly outgrew somewhere along the way but never quite shed. If you’ve ever felt like your real life was happening just slightly out of frame, you’re probably in the right place.
I’m an author, a licensed therapist, and something I’ve come to think of as a story-holder … the kind of person strangers open up to — in line at the grocery store, on a commuter bus, in the middle of perfectly ordinary moments — the one who remembers what you told me months ago because it’s woven into the story I carry of you. I’ve spent my career sitting with people’s interior lives, trying to understand how the human experience fits together from the inside out. Perhaps that’s why writing and therapy have always felt like the same work to me.
My path here wasn’t a straight line. I was the family rebel who did life backwards: high school dropout, mother of three boys by twenty-one, business owner at twenty, and survivor of domestic abuse. I’ve known devastating loss — including the death of my middle son at age five — and the courage it takes to rebuild. I earned my GED in my mid-thirties and went on to graduate school, eventually becoming a licensed therapist. Along the way I’ve lived in seven states, once bought a house in a town I’d never visited, backpacked seventy miles across the Sierras to summit Mt. Whitney, and continually sought adventure in learning new things — from roasting coffee to building a passive solar greenhouse. As a mother, wife, and perpetual student of life, I treasure both the simple moments and the bold leaps.
What draws me to both therapy and fiction is the same thing: I love people and their stories. I believe stories are how we make sense of being human — the ones we tell ourselves, the ones we consume, the ones we finally let go of. I’ve lived emotional pain myself and borne witness to it in countless others. I know intimately what it’s like to carry regrets, to navigate the messy, complicated terrain of real life. Whether in the therapy room or on the page, the through-line of my work is always the same: how do we find our way back to ourselves?
I believe deeply that our experiences exist in shades of gray more often than we’d like to admit, and that happily ever after isn’t always what we expect — it’s often something more interesting, more nuanced, and ultimately more true.
My debut novel is moving towards publication — a multigenerational story about shame, family secrets, and what it means to finally stop believing the worst thing you ever told yourself. In the meantime, there’s a short story I wrote for you. It’s called Just Enough Brave, and it’s yours, free, when you join my list.
If you’re a woman who’s lived enough to know that life defies simple answers — who’s carrying your own complicated story — then I think we have something in common.
I’m glad you found your way here.