After surviving the Titanic disaster at age 12, Frannie Phillips made her choices in life. Then her choices made her. You don’t get the life you deserve. You get the life you create.

In The Year I Made 12 Dresses, Charlotte (Charlie) Hudson thought she’d learned all about her late mother until in Kat’s Kosmic Blues, she discovered that there was much more to her mother, Kat Hudson than she could ever have imagined. Could there be any more family secrets? Charlie thinks not until she discovers her great-grandmother, Frannie Phillips’s stash of eight couture dresses and a grainy photograph that seems to suggest that Frannie survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. Just when Charlie thinks there can be no more skeletons in her family’s closet, she is drawn into Frannie’s incredible life.

After 12-year-old Frannie Phillips survives the sinking of the Titanic, surely, she could be forgiven if she expects her parents to indulge her one dream to become a dressmaker and designer. But this is too common for their British upper-class taste.

Driven by her desire to rebel against everything they represent and a chance encounter on the train from Oxford to London with American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, Frannie makes a single mistake that alters her life forever. She flees to Paris where she is plunged into the clashing worlds of haute couture and literature.

When she is faced with the ultimate choice between two very different life paths, she chooses the one that forces her into a life of secrecy even as she moves between her Paris home, London, New York, and ultimately Canada where her great-granddaughter finds her diaries. Frannie Phillips always knew she would never find her life by searching for it so she created it.

Join Charlie in this, the third almost-but-not-quite-true story as she learns her great-grandmother, Frannie’s, secrets and her ultimate lesson: You don’t get the life you deserve. You get the life you create.

Blending historical fiction with a family saga, from the roaring twenties to contemporary women.