My career began in politics. After two years I moved into capital markets, and by any outside measure I was advancing quickly. Inside, I was restless. A promotion or a new role would satisfy me for a little while, and then the feeling that something was missing would come back.
One day my grandmother mentioned she was planning to hire a ghostwriter. As a child in Hungary she had been imprisoned and had escaped a labour camp. She was one of the youngest there, and now one of the last living survivors, and no one had written down what happened. For reasons I still don't fully understand, I offered to help her myself.
We travelled back to her home country together, and she told me her stories. I felt more present in those moments than I had in years. It was grounding. Honest. Real.
Even then, I ignored the spark. I kept chasing the idea of what my career should be. It took losing a job, health problems that came from my addiction, and collapsing on a plane and waking up in a hospital before I started asking different questions. I began my journey in sobriety.
Someone close to me suggested I lean in to the project with my grandmother. I thought, it's just a hobby, I'm not a writer. But with every other option exhausted, I gave it a shot. Slowly, it clicked. In 2015, Life to Paper was born.
Somewhere along the way, I decided to write my own life story. I rolled out a long sheet of brown paper and wrote it in one go, in sharpie. It wasn't for a book, or marketing, or anyone else. It was for the love of putting life to paper.
We didn't set out to specialize in the hardest stories. They found us, because there was a level of understanding there. My own recovery is why I can offer authors a safe place to tell the stories they once believed they could never share. I'm not a therapist. But putting life to paper is therapeutic, and I've seen people heal from the process.
Eleven years later, my grandmother still keeps our books. She handles the accounting. The mission hasn't changed, and neither has the way we work: one author at a time, with care.
