A River Runs Through Us: What Remains After Life Breaks Open

There are moments in life that break us open.

Moments that leave us asking what remains—after loss, after illness, after relationships fracture in ways we never expected.

In A River Runs Through Us: What Remains After Life Breaks Open, Michelle Thooft invites readers into a deeply personal story shaped by love and loss, cancer and recovery, estrangement and reunion. Through the complexities of adoption, the ache of separation, and the long work of forgiveness—both toward others and within herself—she traces the quiet movement of grace through a life that did not unfold as planned.

This is not a story of easy answers.

It is a story of what holds—when everything else feels like it’s coming apart.

For anyone who has wrestled with faith, carried grief, or wondered if healing is really possible, this memoir offers something steady beneath it all:

You are not alone.

Michelle Thooft is a writer, English instructor, and speaker whose work grows out of lived experience - crisis pregnancy and adoption, motherhood, ministry, illness, estrangement, and the slow work of forgiveness. She is the author of the memoir A River Runs Through Us and its companion journal Write the River. She lives on Minnesota's Iron Range with her husband, where the glorious summers make the winters worth it.