LEANING INTO CURVES

A professional speaker and personal consultant recounts a life’s journey in a memoir that focuses on love and spiritual evolution.

“Lean into curves” was good advice for the author when she was a novice motorcycle passenger, but she also found it to be useful guidance for the winding road of her life. In 1977, she met Jim Pfeffer, a biker and Catholic priest, who was 20 years older and about to enter a rehab program. The sheltered, quiet author believed he was her soul mate, and Jim renounced the priesthood so that they could get married in 1982. The couple became new parents in 1984 and lived paycheck to paycheck as the author pursued a psychology doctorate at West Virginia University. Building a house in West Virginia was a dream come true, but the author fell off a ladder, seriously injuring her back and knee. During their first winter at the new place, the family was snowed in for almost a month. Jim and the author separated in the mid-1990s but reunited a few years later; about six months after that, Jim tragically died in a car accident. Later, a palm reader predicted that the author would meet a doctor, while a Hawaiian kahuna said she’d encounter a ‘teacher of THOUGHT.’ Bill Pettit, her future second husband, was a doctor and the medical director of the Sydney Banks Institute for Innate Health, which led to her meeting a “teacher of THOUGHT”: Banks himself. She also gradually became a follower of Sydney Banks’ Three Principles of Mind, Consciousness, and Thought. Although Pettit’s writing can be prosaic (with numerous unnecessary descriptions of clothing), it’s illuminated by her honesty. For example, the memoirist doesn’t idealize her relationship with Jim after his death; Pettit notes, for instance, that although he was dependable and a kind father, he wasn’t good at communicating his feelings. She critiques Bill, too, as sometimes “unyielding” and disorderly. Pettit also takes care not to spare herself, noting that sometimes she treated her family as “my emotional punching bag.” She makes the spiritual orientation of her book relatable to a wide audience by noting how she initially found the Three Principles to be confusing.

A forthright and approachable remembrance.