A life spent on other people's breathing.

Diane B. Ayari is a respiratory therapist. Her working life is spent keeping other people breathing. Her first book is about the years she spent unable to do it for herself.

She was raised between military postings and small-town judgment, in houses where love arrived unpredictably and left without explanation, and on her grandparents' ranch, which for a while was the only place that held still. What she learned in those years was that people leave — and that if you are good enough, quiet enough, useful enough, perhaps they will not.

She carried that lesson into adulthood and into three marriages. It cost her most of her thirties to understand that endurance is not the same thing as love, and that a woman who gives everything eventually has nothing left to be loved for.

Burning for Love is the account of how she found that out, and what she did afterwards. It is not a book about being rescued. It is a book about the moment she stopped waiting to be.

She writes from a house that is finally quiet, and it is quiet because she made it that way.

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