Every Year Since: a memoir Paperback – March 23, 2026

Three months after the towers fell, everyone told me not to go.I went anyway. A kindergarten teacher from a small town in North Carolina who'd buried more than she'd talk about, survived a divorce she didn't see coming, and spent thirty years filling the silence with laughter so nobody would ask if she was okay. I packed too many shoes, dragged my twelve-year-old son halfway around the world, and landed in India with no idea what I was looking for.I found it anyway.In December 2001, Nancy Barbee boarded a plane to India with her twelve-year-old son Bryce and a journal she'd fill by hand every night in hotel rooms, on trains, and in the back seats of cars that broke down in the middle of nowhere. She lost that journal for twenty-five years. It turned up on the internet, in a place she'd forgotten existed, with her own words waiting for her like they'd been keeping a seat.Every Year Since is the memoir of those twenty-nine days and the twenty-four years that followed. It's about grief and friendship and what happens when you stop listening to the people who tell you to stay put. It's about a woman who found herself in the last place anyone expected — and went back. Every year since.For readers who loved Eat, Pray, Love and Wild, Every Year Since is a story about the courage it takes to leave everything familiar behind — and the grace you find when you do. Read more