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What Always, Forever Is About

Some goodbyes do not happen all at once.

Always, Forever is Leslie Reta’s memoir of loving a man struggling with addiction, becoming a mother, trying to protect her daughter while still loving the person at the centre of so much pain, and eventually learning how to live without constantly waiting for the next crisis.

Told through lived moments, diary entries and reflection, the book follows Leslie from teenage love into marriage, motherhood, repeated instability, endurance, separation and the long emotional aftermath of addiction.

It is not a story about curing addiction.

It is a story about what addiction does to an entire family, to the person living with it, to the partner who loves them, to the child who needs them, and to the people who continue carrying its consequences long after the immediate crisis has passed.

Content Note

This memoir discusses addiction, relapse, family instability, emotional trauma, grief, caregiving and the impact of parental addiction on a child.

About Leslie Reta

Writer, practitioner and trauma-informed educator

Leslie Reta is a family systems practitioner, trauma-informed trainer and author whose work explores trauma, caregiving, addiction, burnout and the emotional impact of surviving complex systems.

With professional experience in child welfare and dual-generation work, she has spent years working alongside families navigating addiction, instability, trauma and systemic pressure. Her work focuses on compassionate accountability, sustainability in helping professions and the long-term consequences of survival-based roles.

She is the author of Always, Forever and The Space Between Safety and Survival.

Follow Leslie on Goodreads

How This Book Found Me

Leslie Reta contacted me by email and asked if I would consider reading Always, Forever.

As I always do when an author sends me a reading request, I looked the book up.

This one felt different.

I received the ARC that morning.
I finished it that same day.

I did not expect to read the entire memoir immediately. I simply opened it, began reading, and discovered very quickly that I was not going anywhere until Leslie had finished telling me her story.

A Note About the Five Stars

I do not believe someone’s life should be judged like fiction.

Memoirs and autobiographical true-life stories receive five stars from me because I am not comfortable assigning a numerical judgment to somebody’s lived experience, trauma, grief or survival.

Instead, I focus on the writing, honesty, clarity, emotional impact and what the author has created from that experience. And in the case of Always, Forever, Leslie’s writing itself deserves enormous praise. The way she writes love, fear, pain and memory is extraordinary.

My Review

Even writing the title now makes my eyes burn with tears.

Always, Forever.

Two simple words that carry a completely different weight once you understand them. What could have been. What should have been. What they hoped for.

There are books you finish, review and eventually move on from.

And then there are books that refuse to leave your mind.

Always, Forever is one of those books.

This is Leslie’s story of loving a man struggling with addiction, of being a mother trying desperately to protect her daughter while still loving the person causing so much of their pain, and of surviving years in which hope, fear, love, anger and responsibility somehow had to coexist.

There were moments, especially when Leslie described how much her daughter was suffering, when my heart absolutely broke. I remember thinking, Girl, take your daughter and run. Move somewhere else. Tell her you don’t know where Daddy is. Just protect her from all of this.

And almost immediately, I realised how simplistic that thought was.

Leslie wasn’t teaching her daughter to run from reality. She was teaching her how to survive it.

That does not mean the pain disappeared. It does not mean what happened was fair, or that a child should ever have had to carry those emotions. But her daughter learned something incredibly difficult; sometimes we suffer, sometimes people we love disappoint us, and sometimes pain becomes part of our story, but we can learn to live alongside it without allowing it to destroy everything else.

Addiction Seen From Every Side

What affected me most about this memoir was that Leslie allowed me to see addiction from so many different places at once.

I saw the wife who still loved her husband.

I saw the mother who needed to protect her daughter.

I saw the daughter who loved her father, wanted to protect him, but desperately needed him to protect and truly see her too.

And I saw the person living with addiction; the suffering, the loss of control and the inability to simply become the person everyone desperately wanted him to be.

I also saw Leslie working professionally to help other families while returning home to a version of the same chaos she was helping others navigate.

For perhaps the first time, a book about addiction made me stop looking for one person to blame.

Addiction does not remain contained inside one person. Its consequences move through a family. It hurts the person experiencing it, but it also changes the lives of the people who love them. Always, Forever allowed me to understand those perspectives without ever asking me to excuse the harm caused.

The Way Leslie Writes

Leslie’s story alone is powerful, but I also need to talk about the writing.

She has a way of using words that makes melodies come from her sentences.

There is enormous emotion in her writing, but it never feels manufactured. Love, fear, exhaustion, anger, grief and pain simply exist on the page with remarkable honesty. She does not need to force the reader to feel something. She tells the truth, and the emotion arrives on its own.

What struck me even more was how little judgment or self-pity there is in this story.

There is pain. There is anger. There is exhaustion. There are consequences.

But underneath everything, there is love.

Another Kind of Love

When Leslie eventually builds a new relationship, the contrast moved me deeply.

She shows us another way love can exist; a man capable of loving a woman without possessing her, giving her trust, freedom and the space to remain herself. After everything that came before, seeing that kind of relationship felt incredibly meaningful.

Reading about Leslie and her husband, I kept thinking that somehow two extraordinarily generous hearts had managed to find one another.

And through all of it, what stayed most visible to me was the love surrounding her daughter.

Why I Think This Book Matters

I genuinely believe Always, Forever should be read and discussed, particularly with older teenagers and young adults.

Not because it offers the comforting idea that life will always be easy if we simply make the right choices.

Quite the opposite.

It shows that life can become terribly complicated. People we love can hurt us. Hope can keep us somewhere longer than we intended to stay. Addiction can affect an entire family. Protecting someone and loving someone are not always the same thing.

And yet we can learn boundaries. We can become resilient without becoming hard. We can retain compassion without abandoning ourselves. We can continue living.

Some books quietly change the way we understand other human beings.

For me, Always, Forever did exactly that.

I admire Leslie’s strength, but even more than that, I admire her heart. When I think about her after reading this book, the first word that comes to me is simply love.

The generosity with which she has loved the people in her life, often while carrying extraordinary emotional weight herself, is something I will think about for a very long time.

Leslie and her family will forever have a place in my heart.

Thank you, Leslie, for trusting me with your story.

Read Always, Forever

Find Leslie Reta’s memoir on Amazon

Always, Forever is available to purchase on Amazon and can also be read through Kindle Unlimited.

This is not an affiliate link. I do not receive commission, payment or a percentage if you buy or read the book. I am sharing it because I believe Leslie’s story deserves to reach the people who may need it.

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Follow the Author

Follow Leslie Reta on Goodreads

If Leslie’s work speaks to you, visit her Goodreads author page, follow her work and discover her other writing.

Leslie Reta on Goodreads

Imperfect Rebel Podcast

Leslie Reta will be joining me on the podcast.

We will talk in greater depth about Always, Forever, about addiction and its impact on families, trauma, motherhood, caregiving, boundaries, love, survival and the experience of turning a deeply personal life into a book.

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