Find a Place for Me: Embracing Love and Life in the Face of Death (Pact Press, November 1, 2022) is an award-winning memoir about facing a marriage’s last act—a spouse’s death—as a couple united in mind and holding hands. Author Deirdre Fagan, D.A., was married eleven years and had two young children when her forty-three-year-old husband Bob was diagnosed with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. ALS determined the journey their marriage would now take, but Bob and Deirdre were resolute in how they traversed their remaining months as a couple. Chronicling Bob’s illness, Find a Place for Me is also the love story of a happy marriage filled with humor, honesty, and essential conversations, despite their tragic circumstances. In this moving and surprisingly funny book, Deirdre and Bob raise a glass to love and the life each of them has left while learning how to lovingly say goodbye.
Find a Place for Me received a bronze medal in the 2022 Living Now Book Awards. An offshoot of the IPPY awards, one of the top awards given to independent publishers, the Living Now Book Award is given to books based on their outstanding ability to enrich readers’ lives.
Deirdre Fagan, D.A., is a widow, wife, mother of two, and associate professor and coordinator of creative writing at Ferris State University. Dr. Fagan, also a divorcee and the sole survivor of her birth family, is the author of the memoir Find a Place for Me (November 1, 2022), a collection of short stories, The Grief Eater (2020), a poetry chapbook, Have Love (2019), and a reference book, Critical Companion to Robert Frost(2007).
Her creative work has recently been published in Newsweek, The Daily Mail, The Coil, eMerge Literary Journal, Eunoia Review, Rat’s Ass Review, Red Eft Review, and Trouvaille Review. Fagan is also the poetry editor at Orange Blossom Review. Fagan holds a doctorate of arts in Humanistic Studies (English & philosophy) and a master of arts in English from University at Albany, SUNY, and a bachelor of arts in English from University at Buffalo, SUNY. Also a literary scholar, her essay on Emily Dickinson was collected in Harold Bloom’s Modern Critical Views. Dr. Fagan has been teaching college literature and writing courses for more than two decades. Meet her at
Listen to Deirdre and Mark here:
