Orlando writer Sarah Marie Shoulak turns a lifetime of loss into lessons on living, one laugh at a time
Sarah Marie Shoulak has an unusual collection: multiple brushes with death. Now she's written a book about it, because apparently that's what you do when the universe keeps giving you material.
Her debut memoir, Dead Serious: How Death Made Me Laugh at Life, lands this April from Soul Speak Press, and it's exactly what the title promises: a deeply personal exploration of mortality that somehow manages to be funny. Not in a deflecting-from-pain way, but in an I've-been-through-enough-to-know-you-have-to-laugh way.
Born in Ohio and raised across the Midwest before bouncing through Denver, Beijing, and Miami, Shoulak collected experiences the way some people collect frequent flyer miles. Along the way, she also collected those brushes with death, grief that spanned generations, and a complicated relationship with substances that eventually led to sobriety. These aren't exactly cocktail party stories, but Shoulak tells them like they could be, with dark humor, radical honesty, and the kind of warmth that makes heavy topics feel a little less heavy.
After more than a decade in Orlando, she's planted roots in Central Florida, and her memoir reflects the kind of universal experiences that local readers will recognize: navigating loss, rebuilding identity, and figuring out how to keep showing up when life deals an objectively terrible hand.
The book's central philosophy? "Get better, not bitter." It's Sarah Marie Shoulak's personal mantra and the thread that holds the memoir together. She's not interested in sugarcoating the hard parts or pretending trauma doesn't leave marks. Instead, she makes the case that you can acknowledge pain, sit with grief, and still choose joy, sometimes all in the same Tuesday afternoon.
Dead Serious tackles weighty themes, multigenerational grief, substance abuse and recovery, identity forged through perseverance, gratitude for life's small moments, but never takes itself too seriously. Shoulak's conversational tone feels less like reading a memoir and more like getting coffee with someone who's been through it and lived to tell the tale with a smirk.
The book is ideal for readers who want memoirs that balance vulnerability with optimism, and it's practically built for book club discussions. There's plenty to unpack about healing, resilience, and the surprisingly fine line between heartbreak and happiness, all without the pressure of finding tidy answers.
Early ordering opens in March through bookstores, with the official release following in April. Sarah Marie Shoulak is available for in-store events, book club visits, author talks, and virtual appearances, essentially anywhere people want to laugh about death and mean it.
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