If You Would Just

For readers of Crazy Love and Goodbye, Sweet Girl, a searing memoir of an eight-year abusive marriage in Miami, and the complicated journey from self-doubt and cultural compliance to the courage to leave.

People ask, “Did you know he was like that before you married him? Why didn’t you just leave? What made you finally say, ‘No more’?”

Angela Kelsey had every advantage a woman in her position could ask for: a PhD, a career, financial independence, a family close by. When Lee roared into her life—charming and generous, promising love and a family of her own—she said yes. Four weeks after their wedding, he shoved her to the floor.

What followed was eight years of physical violence, verbal abuse, and coercive control—and a slow, grinding erosion of the woman Angela knew herself to be. She left and came back. She prayed, bargained, reasoned, and endured. She learned to read the weather of his moods. She had the resources to leave; there were no children to complicate it. But she stayed anyway.

A clear-eyed interrogation of the complicated interior of a woman who knew better and couldn’t yet act on what she knew, If You Would Just is a book about the space between who we think we would be—and who we actually become.