Growing Up Girl, Book One: Untethered explores the line between what is inadequately referred to as the real world versus the imaginal. The dualism does not hold up; the line is blurred. The premise that grounds this statement is that memory is no more factual or consistent than imagination. Memory is not only fallible but selective. Imagination tells a story the way it needs to be told for the sake of its meaning.

Bernadette Aller is a storyteller whose wisdom allows her to challenge the fluidity of time, not in a linear way, but in the sharing of one story as it emerges from another. Her intent is to use storytelling to interpret the meaning of life—including oocasional stories of trauma that tend to stay hidden— so that readers recognize the clear invitation to do the same within their own lives, their own stories.

This unconventional novel reflects the best of our science, particularly quantum science, and how it might make its way into a macro world such as Bernadette’s and those who people her life. If we heed the science that tells us time is a human construct, then Bernadette is right in step with the science of quantum.

About the Author

Caroline Fairless is a rural Western Pennsylvania native, and has never been at home behind a desk in an office. Fairless completed her undergraduate work at Columbia University, moved to Vermont and built (by herself) a wooden house in the Champlain Valley.

Fairless drove a city transit bus while in Seattle, and six years later entered the Episcopal seminary in Berkeley, CA. She was ordained in San Francisco in 1989, and over the next thirty years served congregations in Californa, Roanoke, VA; Rochester, NY; Maryland; and New London, NH, where she retired from her ministry.

Fairless is the author of several books: Hambone, Confessions of a Fake Priest, The Dance of the Caterpillars, The Space Between Church & Non-Church, and The God Presumption. She has contributed to two anthologies, Let the Beauty You Love and Thin Places. Growing Up Girl: Book One, Untethered is her first published adult fiction and will be followed by Books Two and Three.

Fairless continues to write and has been a ceramic sculptor since childhood. In her retirement, she is learning new art forms. She is a retreat facilitator with a focus on the interdependence and connectedness of every being.