What We Wish Were True

by Tallu Schuyler Quinn

First published 2022

Tallu Schuyler Quinn built her life around fighting hunger and inequality. She founded the Nashville Food Project and dedicated herself to food justice work across Middle Tennessee. Then doctors delivered devastating news just after her fortieth birthday: stage IV glioblastoma, an aggressive terminal brain cancer. Quinn faces the unbearable prospect of leaving her husband and children behind. She wrestles with what it means to find purpose when death approaches. Through deeply personal essays, she explores family bonds, spiritual calling, and community while navigating her diagnosis. Quinn holds hope and grief simultaneously, discovering that love expands beyond her individual existence. She examines how weakness might become strength and brokenness might find wholeness. The book weaves together stories of vocational purpose, divine welcome, and the reality of living with brain cancer. Quinn offers hard-won wisdom about cherishing each moment and releasing lesser worries. She reveals that the love we seek has already found us, present and without limits.

Genres: family, death, grief, contemporary, biography-memoir, 21st-century, activism, christian-living

Vibes: emotional-atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking

Tropes: cherishing-moments, facing-mortality, finding-purpose

Setting: Middle Tennessee, Nashville

Period: 21st Century

208 pages · Hardcover · Convergent Books

Content warnings: death, terminal-illness

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