New Becoming Your Best Version Podcast episode! Penny Lane is a writer, wife and mother with an insatiable passion for life and books. Her latest book is Redeemed, A Memoir of a Stolen Childhood, a rise-from-the-ashes hero’s story of overcoming abuse, trauma, and unbearable odds, of being waylaid by both family and religion’s promise of love, and harnessing the resilience to find the way home.
Kirkus Reviews calls her book, "Articulate, emotional prose brings readers into the author’s struggle to reclaim her inner strength and begin a new life (“I felt a power…a strength in my physical being. My soul shifted. I would never stand down to him, or anyone, ever again”).”
Penny describes in this episode how she grew up in fear and thereafter lived a life based in fear until she got help. She found a new way of living by obtaining therapy and feeling validated by others, including by those she met via Al Anon, where she was surrounded by other survivors. She earned her college degree in her 30s and refused to allow the painful life she lived in her childhood hold her back anymore.
Originally from Jackson Heights, Queens, New York, where she felt like a "closet Jew," since the religion spoke to her even as a child, Penny converted to Judaism in 2016 and found a spiritual home. She loves being outdoors-cycling, hiking, traveling, and connecting to and inspiring people. She has a BS in business and management from the University of Phoenix and an MA in industrial/organizational psychology from Golden Gate University. In her spare time, she helps underserved youth learn to read, apply to college, and find jobs once they graduate, and in food pantries and other non-profits near her home in Mill Valley, California.
Listen (please subscribe/review) on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts:
Find out more about her work and follow her:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Pennylanewriter
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pennylane_writer/
You are brave and a powerful writer and speaker! Thank you for sharing your light and experience with the world! Honored to have had you on the Becoming Your Best Version Podcast. You are definitely becoming your best version! With love and appreciation, Maria Leonard Olsen www.MariaLeonardOlsen.com