Cassidy Gard’s 10 Best Books to Read at Life’s Crossroads
I have always been drawn to memoirs. Reading one feels like being handed someone’s private journal, with permission to enter the most observant and vulnerable corners of a life. I always knew I would write one. In my early 20s, I started emailing myself fragments I did not want to lose: a sentence I overheard on a downtown sidewalk in New York, a feeling I could not yet explain, a quote that hit me in the chest. Tiny shards of meaning. Years later, I opened my Google Drive and found 15 years of notes waiting for me, little time capsules from former versions of myself, full of things I had completely forgotten and once felt desperate to preserve. Add to that the stacks of journals I have carried across cities, and a pattern becomes obvious. I have always been fascinated by the interior worlds of women, what drives us, what undoes us, what remakes us.
The first memoir I read was Eat, Pray, Love when I was 16. One line has stayed with me ever since: “I crossed the street to walk in the sunshine.” I still do that. If I am walking and the sunnier side is across the road, I cross and think of that sentence. My own memoir, Cosmic Goodness: Surrendering the Shadows to Live in the Light, publishes May 12, 2026 (pre-order here). I began writing it in 2017, after my first major heartbreak and my father’s death landed within six months of each other. The book follows my coming of age in my 20s and at the threshold of 30, when career ambition, grief, dating, identity, and the desire for family all collided. It moves through the high-pressure years of building a life in the media, the private fallout of loss and inherited pain, and the spiritual and emotional reckoning that forced me to rebuild from the inside out. At its core, it is a story about learning to trust yourself after rupture, choosing love without abandoning your ambition and discovering that reinvention is not a single leap but a thousand small acts of courage.
In my book, I write about what I call ‘hurricane women,’ inspired by John Green’s line in Looking for Alaska: “If people were rain, I was drizzle, and she was a hurricane.” I found that quote at a pivotal time, dating while deep in a demanding career and quietly terrified that if I did not make space for love, I would miss my chance to build a family. As the daughter of an alcoholic, I often felt like an emotional orphan. A friend once told me, “Just be easy and breezy. They love that.” I answered, “I am windy and complicated.” Green’s line helped me make peace with an interior world that never aligned with bite-sized clichés. So I turned to books. I found women writers who transformed their messiest truths into art. I am obsessed with quotes, those 10- to 20-word lines that can rewire a mindset and redirect a life. I even opened every chapter of my memoir with one, pulled from the thousands saved in my phone notes.
The books below (and the quotes I’ve pulled from them) didn’t just inspire me—they gave me permission. Permission to be complicated, to be a hurricane, to take up space. They reminded me that the sharp, messy parts of ourselves aren’t flaws to be fixed but truths to be honored. And when I finally gave myself that permission, my own story came pouring out.
