“Hold tight, hold steady,” were the last words Claudette Gormley heard her mother proclaim as she took her last breaths before dying at the age of seventy-seven. In this memoir, Gormley links the past and the present and discusses how she has honored her mother’s final words.

A wife, mother, grandmother, friend, and teacher, Gormley shares her memories as life lessons. A child of the sixties, she survived a rough childhood of divorce and poverty. Holding tight to her twin Claudia, she writes of living in Ohio, Kentucky, California, Missouri, and Florida where each place helped her to understand that the vast taproot of being planted and nurtured was dictated not by location, but by the faces of those who are family and friends. Faith Speaker charts her life-married at twenty and following her husband, Art, from job to job and church to church.

This memoir is one woman’s voice as she speaks about her heartbreaks and joys in life and the accumulation of events that have helped her to become who she is today. Faith Speaker shares Gormley’s adventures of rowing down the river of life and how memories contribute to who we are and who we become.