The memoir opens with a dream fulfilled: a home on African soil, land worked by hand, a refuge for family, and the seed of a community renaissance. But the dream dissolves as quickly as it appears, revealing itself not as memory but as longing—a vision the narrator has been striving toward for two decades, one that collapses in less than a year. From that unraveling, The End of the Rainbow Fled traces backward and forward through the landscapes that shaped the journey: a childhood marked by homelessness and a brother’s chronic pain, a mother’s depression, years of navigating identity at UC Berkeley, medical training forged in both purpose and pressure, the search for an absent father, and a global odyssey across five countries in pursuit of belonging.
Moving between continents and emotional fault lines, the memoir follows a young man who learns early that safety comes from being useful—a belief that drives him into medicine, activism, and a life built around saving others. But when the farm he builds in South Africa is taken from him, when his efforts to redeem his father falter, and when his family’s struggles deepen just as his own foundation gives way, he is forced into a reckoning he can no longer postpone. He must confront the truth beneath his ambition: that the role he created to survive is the very identity he must release to live.
Told with clarity, restraint, and an eye toward the spiritual dimensions of suffering, The End of the Rainbow Fled explores the inheritance of pain, the mythology of return, and the unexpected freedom that emerges when the pursuit of control gives way to acceptance. It is a memoir about the limits of resilience, the cost of carrying others, and the quiet liberation that begins where the dream ends.
Completed manuscript; seeking literary representation.