Some stories are about triumph. Others are about survival. The Long Way I Came is about becoming.
In this reflective memoir, Andrea Haney Poole traces the often invisible path of learning who you are when life refuses to follow a straight line. Moving through the landscape that shaped a life—family, loss, ambition, responsibility, and the quiet pressure to become who the world expects—she explores what it means to remain yourself when circumstances try to rewrite you.
This is not a story about having everything figured out. It is about what happens when you begin to trust your own voice, carry what life has given you with honesty, and move forward without abandoning yourself.
Part of the Radical Optimism series, The Long Way I Came reflects the quiet courage of staying open to life, even after it asks more of you than you expected. Through lived experience rather than instruction, Andrea invites readers to consider their own path, the conditions that shaped them, and the person they have become along the way.
For readers drawn to reflective memoirs about identity, resilience, personal growth, and self-discovery, this book offers companionship rather than answers.
Sometimes the long way is the way.
Book Links
Author Interview
I have always been a pretty happy, shiny person, and people have often asked me why I am that way, especially once they learn some of what I have been through.
My answer is usually the same: “When you have seen the worst that it gets, you get a new perspective on how bad things really are right now.”
That perspective was really the beginning of The Long Way I Came. I had reached a point in my life where I could look back at the person I had been, the choices I had made, and the things I had lived through with more curiosity than judgment. I became interested in the distance between who we were and who we are becoming.
Eventually, I realized there was a book in that distance.
I did not want to turn my life into a neat transformation story because that is not how I experienced it. The path was winding, sometimes funny, and rarely obvious while I was living it. The Long Way I Came became a way of looking honestly at all of those experiences and recognizing that every version of me had a hand in becoming the person I am now.
As I was writing, I realized that including everything would change what the book was. The Long Way I Came was never meant to be an accounting of everything that has happened to me. There is an air of possibility in the book that was very important for me to preserve.
I also wanted people to find pieces of themselves in my story. We may not have lived the same lives, but we have probably felt some of the same things. Sometimes adding more detail about my particular experiences actually created more distance between me and the reader rather than less.
There are more stories I could tell, and perhaps someday I will. But this book is less about everything that happened to me and more about what we might recognize in one another.
That distance gave me perspective and clarity. I could see the experiences again through the eyes of the people who lived them, including the person I was then, while also bringing everything I have learned since.
One of the more interesting challenges was finding the words that would allow someone else to experience those moments with me. I had to think beyond what happened and remember what it felt like to be there, what mattered to me then, and what I could and could not see from where I stood.
In trying to make those moments real for someone else, I found myself appreciating many of them differently, too.
Our lives rarely make sense while we are living them. We make choices, change direction, get things right, get things spectacularly wrong, meet people who change us, begin again, and become different versions of ourselves along the way.
When we take the time to observe our lives, though, we begin to see more. We notice patterns. We recognize moments that mattered in ways we could not have known at the time. We can look at who we were with the perspective of who we are now. And when we bring that same curiosity to other people, we remember that they have entire journeys behind them that we may know nothing about.
That is why I called the book The Long Way I Came. We all have a road behind us, and there is value in turning around occasionally and noticing how far we have traveled.
I hope the book leaves readers a little more curious about their own stories and the stories unfolding around them, and hopeful about all that has not happened yet.
LET’S ADD SOME FUN!
I spent a lot of time writing The Long Way I Came either curled up in bed or sitting on our back porch with cozy blankets and good music. Apparently, my ideal writing environment is just being as comfortable as humanly possible while listening to something that helps me get in the zone.
And someday, I would love to give a talk on a really big stage, too. But perhaps I am allowed more than one thing on my bucket list!
The best place to find me is andreahaneypoole.com. You can find my books there, along with the How Very Human podcast, my Field Notes, and whatever I happen to be creating next. You can also find me on Instagram, Threads, Facebook, and LinkedIn as Andrea Haney Poole.
Book Excerpt
I was
nineteen and trying to hold myself together. Leaving my hometown carried a
sense of openness I had long wished for, yet it felt larger up close than it
had in my imagination. As the trees closed around the road and the dorm
buildings appeared through the branches, the reality of it pressed deeper into
me. The separation, the shift, the start of a life beyond the one I had
known—it all rose faster than I could manage.
Tears
blurred my vision as I drove. I kept my pace behind my mother’s car, wiping my
face whenever her taillights came into view so she wouldn’t worry. The tears
came from the weight of entering a world where everything would be unfamiliar.
My brother wasn’t beside me, making jokes to steady my nerves. My mother was
ahead, carrying her own mix of hope and heartache. And the road forward felt
wide enough to steady and unsettle me in equal measure.
By the time we parked, I had tried to smooth my face back into a neutral expression, but the blotchiness gave me away immediately. My mother read it the moment I stepped out—she always has a way of seeing what I’m carrying.
Guest Post
The Courage
to Tell Your Own Story
By Andrea
Haney Poole
For a long
time, I thought telling your story meant knowing what the story was.
Beginning,
middle, end. This happened, then this happened, and here is what it all meant.
Writing The
Long Way I Came complicated that idea for me.
When I went
back to write about things that had happened years earlier, I realized I was
looking at them with information I did not have when I lived them. I knew what
happened next. I knew which people stayed in my life and which ones did not.
Some things I worried about endlessly turned out to matter very little. Moments
I barely noticed at the time ended up changing me.
Of course I
saw things differently.
But that
made me wonder which version was the real one.
I think the
answer might be all of them.
We make
sense of things with whatever we have available to us at the time. Someone does
not call, and we decide what the silence means. We make a mistake and decide
what it says about us. Something does not work out the way we hoped, and we
start building an explanation for why.
Sometimes we
carry those explanations for years.
The person I
was at nineteen understood her life with nineteen years of experience. I cannot
go back and give her everything I know now. I can only look at her from here
and recognize things she could not have known yet.
She
certainly did not know, driving up a small Tennessee mountain toward her
college dorm, what that road would eventually lead to. I know more of that
story now.
More of it.
Not all of it.
I am sure
there are things about my life right now that I will understand differently ten
years from now. There may even be things I never fully understand.
I used to
think there would eventually be some point when all of it made sense. I am less
convinced of that now.
We can only
tell our stories from where we are standing.
You do not
have to write a memoir to create stories about yourself. We all do. The stories
show up without us thinking much about them: I have always been this way. I
am terrible at that. I should have known better. I missed my chance.
Maybe you
believed those things once. Maybe you still do.
But when was
the last time you checked if they were still you?
There are
parts of The Long Way I Came that surprised me as I wrote them. There
are things I understand differently now than I did when I wrote the book. I
expect that will keep happening.
I like
knowing that.
My story is
still moving because I am.
Yours is,
too.
Maybe
telling your own story begins with being willing to turn around once in a while
and notice the long way you came.
Author
footer:
Andrea Haney Poole
is the author of The Long Way I Came. Find her books, How Very Human podcast,
Field Notes, and more at andreahaneypoole.com.
Andrea Haney Poole is an author, speaker, and human-centered strategist whose work explores what it means to be human in the systems we build and inhabit. She is the author of The Long Way I Came, a memoir of identity, resilience, and radical optimism, and serves as Awards Director for the Colorado Authors League.
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