Self-Assembly - by Katya Andresen (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

For readers of Leslie Jamison and Nora Ephron, a memoir told in essays and lyrical fragments about outgrowing the life you've built--by choice or by force--and assembling yourself into someone new.

One Tuesday in Kyiv, Katya Andresen discovered the marriage she thought she was holding together had already come undone. Within forty-eight hours, she went from expat wife to single working mother with no permanent address--and on the hook for a business book contract she no longer had the heart to finish. That unraveling became the catalyst for a very different kind of story: this one.

Self-Assembly is a memoir told in essays, letters, lists, and lyrical fragments about what it means to keep becoming--across careers and conflict zones, marriages and miscarriages, continents and identities. It moves with curious energy through the moments that split a life open and demand you reconfigure everything you knew, with no blueprint and no tidy lessons waiting at the end.

In science, self-assembly is the process by which scattered molecules spontaneously organize into something new and whole. In life, it's what women do when the version of themselves they've been living no longer fits. This book is not a manual for reinvention. It is a mirror: wry, unsparing, and deeply companionable for any woman who is quietly rebuilding herself while still living her life.

Review Quotes

"Beautifully relatable, Katya Andresen doesn't do tidy lessons. She writes with real honesty about what happens when life stops going as planned and becomes something you didn't know you needed. I inhaled every word."--Jennifer Pastiloff, bestselling author of Proof of Life: Let Go, Let Love, and Stop Looking for Permission to Live Your Life

"Raw, vulnerable, and beautifully told, this is a story about the messy, complicated work of continually putting ourselves back together--and the hope that comes from realizing we can. Katya's story is so relatable and ultimately empowering, reminding us that we are all works in progress."--Fran Hauser, bestselling author of The Myth of the Nice Girl, keynote speaker, and owner of Bedford Books

"Self-Assembly is one of those rare memoirs that makes you feel less alone in your own life. Katya Andresen writes with wit and unflinching honesty about building--and rebuilding--herself through war zones and boardrooms, marriage and motherhood, divorce and reinvention. Reading her feels like sitting down with your most clear-eyed friend. If you've ever had to reinvent yourself as life changed shape around you, this book will feel as though it was written with you in mind."--Barbara Becker, author of Heartwood: The Art of Living with the End in Mind

About the Author

Katya Andresen is a former foreign correspondent who never stopped asking questions--she just changed what she was investigating. After covering business, politics, and armed conflict for Reuters in Asia and the Associated Press in Africa, she became a C-suite executive at a Fortune 20 company and a director on the board of Wiley, the global publishing, research, and education company. She is a LinkedIn Top Voice with more than 1.2 million followers and the author of Robin Hood Marketing. She lives in Washington, DC.