Everybody Has a Book in Them This Is Mine
This Is Mine
I never set out to write a book.
What I set out to do was survive an empty house. When the youngest of my four children, my daughter left home for university in Scotland, something in me went quiet along with the rooms. The noise I'd complained about for years, the towels left wet on the bathroom floor, the arguments over whose turn it was to walk the dog, the random sock on the stairs that didn’t make it to the washing machine and was left discarded, the fridge door that was never quite closed properly, the open cupboard doors in the kitchen, all of it stopped at once.
And in that silence, I didn't know what to do with myself. So I did the only thing that made sense: I picked up my journal and a pen.
I wasn't writing for anyone. I was writing to get the feelings out of my head and onto a page where I could actually look at them. Some nights it was three lines. Some nights it was three pages. I wrote about the ache of a quiet kitchen table, about hearing myself think for the first time in twenty years, about grief for a version of motherhood that had ended without anyone telling me it was ending. I didn't have a word for it yet. I just knew it hurt in a way nobody had warned me about.
The Conversation That Changed Everything
Years later, I was talking to a friend the way you do, half catching up, half unloading and I mentioned the journal. Almost as an afterthought. I read her a page.
She went quiet for a moment, and then she said the sentence that changed everything: "Paula, that's not just a journal. That's a book. Every body has a book inside them, this is your book. You need to write this."
I laughed it off at first. Everybody says that, don't they? and being totally honest I had not done any “proper” writing since school. But she didn't let it go. And the more I sat with it, the more I realised she wasn't just being kind she was right. What I'd written wasn't only my story.
It was every parent's story who'd ever stood in a quiet hallway wondering where their child, and a piece of themselves, had gone.
That's the thing about the book everyone tells you that you have in you. It's usually already half-written, in the words you've been keeping to yourself.
From Journal to Manuscript
Turning private pages into a book that other people could pick up wasn't just a copy-and-paste job. It meant going back through years of raw, unfiltered entries and asking hard questions: What actually belongs here? What's just me venting? What will genuinely help someone else feel less alone?
I added structure where my journal had none. I brought in research to sit alongside the emotion because it turns out the science behind that empty-nest ache is real, I didn’t have a word for it yet. I just knew it hurt in a way nobody had warned me about.
That's the thing about the book everyone tells you that you have in you. It's usually already half-written, in the words you've been keeping to yourself.
And understanding it helped me as much as writing about it did. I found my own throughline in what had once been scattered, private, middle-of-the-night thoughts.
And then came the part nobody warns you about: publishing. I did a little research into this too because I have never done anything like this before and chose a vanity publishing company who offered to help get my book up to publishing standard for a small fee. Working with a publishing company, learning what a manuscript actually needs to look like, formatting it , designing the front cover , Blurb and Author biography was almost as hard as writing the book itself, and then there was getting it onto Amazon it was a steep, sometimes overwhelming, and entirely worth it climb.
Then came the publishing and promotion all totally new to me and daunting
The Book: When the House Goes Quiet
The result is When the House Goes Quiet.
A book about the transition so many of us go through and so few of us talk about honestly. It's about the emptiness that arrives when the house empties out. It's about learning to sit in silence instead of running from it, and slowly discovering who you are underneath for me forty years of being needed not every minute of the day but being needed.
If you've ever stood in a hallway that used to be loud and felt strangely undone by how quiet it's become, this book was written for you.
If You Have a Book in You Too
I think about that conversation with my friend often. If she hadn't said something, those pages might still be sitting in a drawer.
So if you're journaling, if you're writing down the hard, private, middle-of-the-night thoughts just to get through them don't be so sure it's only for you. Sometimes the book is already there. It just takes someone else to see it before you can.
When the House Goes Quiet is available now on Amazon: https://amzn.eu/d/05YiwbR8