Casey needs a family of her own: the joys and the sorrows, people who love her, and a place she belongs—what Zorba the Greek called “the full catastrophe”—and she’s determined to make it happen.

Adrift in the world after losing her father to a heart attack when she was eleven and her mother to cancer soon after, the death of her only sibling eight years later strengthens her resolve.

Casey marries, has three children, and though she struggles with grief and a shaky sense of her place in the world, she thinks she’s found the life she’s longed for. But soon it’s clear her marriage isn’t the dream she envisioned. When her husband’s behavior shifts from troubling to destructive, a contentious divorce and custody trial propel her family into a catastrophe she never imagined. Searching for meaning, Casey embraces the spirituality she’s sought in various forms since her youngest years. Then the unthinkable happens—her twenty-year-old son Eric dies—and she’s left to make sense of her family’s collapse and the sudden yet somehow inevitable loss of her beloved boy.

A profoundly moving tribute to the power of love, The Full Catastrophe is the story of a life of loss and sorrow transformed into one of hope and redemption. With hard-won wisdom, Casey shows us how peace and belonging can only be found within ourselves.