After growing up hearing principles and rules for life that implied that if you were good, nothing bad would happen to you, Suze Fair's worldview was upended when she was diagnosed with cancer at age 15. In All the Lies I've Loved Before: Discover the Joy That Comes With an Honest and Authentic Life. Suze details how that first diagnosis and subsequent other "bad things happening to a good person" (aka HER) needed to be met with the Truth rather than so many of the lies she was ultimately led to believe in her growing-up years.
For the first 14 years of her life, Suze Fair's story was that of a pretty typical kid growing up in the Midwest. She was the daughter of a high-achieving dad who had his Ph.D. by the time he was 34 and a stay-at-home mom who kept order in the household and in her children's lives by establishing a lot of rules. The youngest of three siblings, Suze was sassy, stubborn, and determined and approached life with the naive belief that if you are "good" nothing bad will happen to you. Then she turned 15, a year when normal teenage "stuff" should be happening; instead, no amount of parental achievement or rule-making could change the doctor's two-word utterance that would change all of their lives forever: "It's Cancer." This life-altering moment would launch Suze into a decades-long journey that would include three more cancer diagnoses and hundreds of moments where all the truth she had been taught to live by from her parents, her church, and her culture, just wouldn't hold up anymore. In fact, some of them were downright fabrications.
Now, at the age of 57, former college professor Suze Fair and current pastor and entrepreneur invites readers to peer into the minefield of lies she believed connected to her body, relationships, motherhood, marriage and work. Suze shares as she names the lies she lived, replacing each of them with the Truth she discovered. Along the way, readers will be invited to take a moment to examine their own lies to see if there might be a Truth to replace the lie, a Truth to live by.
