When The Closed Heart Opens:

She grew up in a house where the fighting started after dark, with a mother who would not pay her a compliment until she was well into her thirties. She married at seventeen. What followed was a life she built rather than inherited: two sons raised from Alaska to England to Switzerland, a Harvard classroom found in middle age, an executive career at a company that grew from twenty-six employees to a hundred and ten thousand — and a slow, hard-won reckoning with forgiveness. When the Closed Heart Opens is the story of a woman searching for herself and, in the finding, learning everything no one had thought to tell her. Claudette P. Crouse writes about the things she was never told: that working hard is not always rewarded, that fairness is not returned as a matter of course, that the people you help may resent you for it, and that recovery is the work of a lifetime rather than a season. Every chapter ends with what she learned. "This book is my contribution to women who might need a helping hand on their journey to create the quality of life they desire."