A memoir of survival, love, and the fire that never dies
Burning
for Love
What would you endure for love?
The story
Diane B. Ayari learned early that love could disappear without warning. Raised between military moves, small-town judgment, addiction, violence, and the shelter of her grandparents' ranch, she grew into a woman determined to build the family she had lost.
But the hunger to be loved led her into marriages and relationships where endurance too often replaced safety, and giving became a way of vanishing.
Burning for Love is the story of a girl who survived abandonment, a mother who tried to turn pain into purpose, and a woman who finally asked the hardest question of all: what if the love I kept searching for had to begin with me?
Details
| Format | Paperback & Kindle |
|---|---|
| Pages | 174 |
| Size | 6 × 9 in |
| ISBN | 978-1-312-27074-9 |
| Publisher | Diane Ayari |
| Price | $4.99 |
| Reading age | 18+ — contains accounts of abuse |
The opening
Before dawn, my grandfather stood in my doorway and said my name as if it might break.
The floor under the trailer had gone cold the way it always did in the last black hour before morning, and I felt it through the blanket, and I felt the draft from the hall, and I lay still in the warm hollow my own body had made and listened to a silence that was wrong. There should have been the furnace ticking. There should have been my mother's small night-sounds through the wall.
There was only my grandfather's voice, saying Diane, once, softly, the way you say a word you are afraid of, and the lamp burning yellow somewhere behind him in a house that had no business being lit at that hour.
From Scene One — The First Burn.
Contents
- Scene OneThe First Burn
A house on the Utah plain, the hour before dawn, and a grandfather in a child's doorway.
- Scene TwoThe House Goes Quiet
Four words whispered into a bedroom door, and how few nights were left.
- Scene ThreeA Family I Could Keep
Building the thing she had never been given, out of whatever was to hand.
- Scene FourThe Cost of Staying
Endurance mistaken for love, and the arithmetic of staying anyway.
- Scene FiveA Light of My Own
The hardest question, asked last: what if it had to begin with me?