The Life You Get: A Memoir of Recovery, Reward, and Reflection

The Life You Get: A Memoir of Recovery, Reward, and Reflection is a heartfelt, candid, and quietly powerful story of one woman's journey through eight decades of joy, struggle, faith, and resilience. Born a preacher's kid in mid-century Montana, Donna Gilbertson Andersen reflects on a life both ordinary and extraordinary, one marked by spiritual awakenings, emotional wounds, addiction and recovery, and hard-won personal growth. From her happy place at Flathead Lake, Montana, to her forever home in Morro Bay, California, from family bonds to heartbreak and healing, Andersen traces the turning points and the relationships that shaped her: an unwanted haircut, two marriages and divorces, the birth of her children, and more than forty years of sobriety.

Told with honesty, insight, and humor, The Life You Get is a deeply personal exploration of how identity, love, self-awareness, and friendships evolve over time. With warmth and the sure voice of an empowered woman, Andersen invites readers-especially her friends, family, and fellow baby boomers-to reflect on their own journeys and what it means to live a life of purpose and truth.

Donna Andersen credits her Norwegian roots and her family's Nordic stoicism for the inner strength that has helped her time and again survive the "misses"-sometimes very near misses-on her life's journey. Her upbringing emphasized discipline and perseverance and taught her to focus, ultimately, on what's within her own control. As a proud Montana native, Andersen spent most of her childhood in the state's north-central wheat fields; during her college years, she worked for one summer in majestic Glacier National Park, and she has a cherished and continuing family history at beautiful Flathead Lake in northwestern Montana, where she was born. When Andersen was fourteen, her father's pastoral calling relocated the family to a Lutheran parish in California. From a young age, and continuing today, Andersen loved the outdoors, the piano, and books. She holds a bachelor's degree in French, and while she never became a fluent translator as she imagined she might (perhaps that dream will be realized in another lifetime), she remains an ardent Francophile. During her first marriage, Andersen enjoyed a few years of East Coast living, on Long Island, New York. Life turned exponentially more serious during her thirties and forties when she faced addiction to alcohol and cigarettes, and the abuse within-and failure of-two marriages. Today, she's a retired civil servant living on California's beautiful Central Coast. She's the proud and happy mother of two and grandmother of six. Andersen's lifelong love of words naturally led to an interest in writing. Before this memoir, she self-published Sermons for Everyday Living (Lulu Press, 2007), a collection of her father's sermons. Find Donna at donnajean17@att.net.