The Fate We Make

The Fate We Make: Heartbreak, is the first volume of a remarkable, occasionally tragic. but ultimately redemptive coming-of-age story. From an early age, Simone Warren recognized that she was caught between her family’s expectations and her need to find her own path and voice. Born into a Singaporean Chinese family and a life rooted in tradition, her story is a stunning tale of survival and an inspiring look at how we can learn to move beyond trauma to forge a path toward finding happiness.

Raised in a family populated with strong women but laced with the strife of the generations that preceded her, Simone’s life story reads like an inter-continental odyssey that follows her from an exceptional childhood through her tumultuous teens and toward young womanhood – as she endeavours to make peace with a decision that she will live with forever.

Recounting in beautiful detail the lives of the powerful women who shaped her family and how their stories informed her place in the world, this first instalment in a trilogy of deeply personal memoirs is an unflinching look at finding oneself in the midst of crushing expectation and unexpected tragedy. Journeying beyond survival to success.

In 2022, seemingly successful as a senior director working for a global technology solutions provider, life throws Simone another curve ball – life-threatening hypertension and potential broken heart syndrome. Now she must revisit what happened when she was seventeen, re-tracing her journey through heartbreak and depression, so she can find the ghosts from her past who haunt her still.

Simone Warren was born in Singapore in 1969, the third generation of Straits-born Chinese who migrated from China to 'Si Lat Po', a then British colony. Simone left Singapore for Britain in 1989 to study English and Drama at Westfield College and the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, University of London, whose illustrious alumni include Laurence Olivier, Judi Dench, Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. At university, she was President of the Creative Writing Society. Simone has worked for global organisations including Siemens, BT, Alibaba and Microsoft, where she was a senior director running a multimillion-dollar Cloud Computing business. She lives in Cambridgeshire, UK, with her husband and two grown-up children.

Lee Kin Mun is better known as mrbrown, the Blogfather of Singapore. Since 1997, he has been up to mischief online from the dawn of Singapore's internet, writing satire, penning silly songs, making comedy podcasts like the mrbrown show (one of the earliest and longest running podcasts in Singapore) and producing online videos as Kim Huat, Singapore's Number One complainer.