Tombolo Books welcomes local author Ayana Lage to the bookstore to celebrate the launch of her memoir Missing Me: A Memoir of Postpartum Psychosis and the Long Road Back. 

Missing Me is a stunning memoir  about motherhood, postpartum mental health, and finding ground when you lose all control. Lage will be in conversation with fellow local author and journalist Stephanie Hayes.

More about Missing Me

When writer and blogger Ayana Lage became pregnant, she prepared as any parent would: voraciously researching, Redditing, preparing for anything. And having experienced a previous miscarriage, she braced herself for the worst. But days after giving birth, Ayana’s sense of control began to break when God started speaking to her. After growing up Pentecostal and longing to hear from God, she heard him audibly for the first time—and often. God told her that she had been chosen. He told her that her daughter was the second coming of Jesus Christ. She carried around notebooks to ensure she didn't miss any divine words. Eventually, she was diagnosed with post-partum psychosis and sent to a psychiatric ward, unable to see loved ones or her baby and sometimes unsure whether she'd actually had a baby at all.

Her once-rational thought process was consumed with delusions, and overnight, the self-professing people-pleaser turned into a fearless charismatic, obeying what she believed to be God’s orders—including pulling the fire alarm to force an evacuation in the hospital—and shouting at anyone who disagreed with her. Slowly, the medication and treatment began to work, and when she was well enough to be released, the hard road to recovery began.

Ayana struggled to adjust to normal life after the breaks she endured—both the psychosis itself and the experience of feeling betrayed by her mind. Once a fierce mental health advocate, she still remained hesitant to share about psychosis, because of the stigma associated with this mental health disorder.

Drawing from Ayana’s notebooks and medical records, Missing Me is a gorgeously-written exploration of the revelations Ayana received during her psychotic episode, the surprising lessons about her life and faith revealed in the aftermath, and the long road to trusting her mind once again.

Ayana Lage is a blogger and freelance writer with bylines in The Washington Post, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, and more. She has a B.S. in journalism from the University of Florida. When she’s not working, you’ll find her exploring Tampa with her husband and two children.

Stephanie Hayes is an author and journalist who writes a nationally syndicated column with the Tampa Bay Times. She has received writing prizes from the National Headliner Awards, Green Eyeshade Awards, the Society for Features Journalism and the Florida Society of News Editors, among others. Her writing has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and more. She is the author of Be Serious, an essay collection, and Obitchuary, a novel. She lives in Dunedin, Florida with her husband, stepdaughter, enormous cat and tiny dog.