DEBUT Novel Out Now
“A memoir of survival and healing: a woman’s journey from a difficult childhood in communist Romania to peace, faith, and coming home to herself.”
— A Memoir
Letters
to God
A Memoir of Survival, Silence and Coming Home to Myself
Written at sixty-six, from a place of peace rather than pain — not to relive what happened, but to show what's possible on the other side of it.
ROOTS
For as long as I can remember, I have needed to grow something.
As a child in Baile Felix, Romania, I walked into the forest every day and came home with flowers for my mother. Wherever I lived after that, there was always a garden - bare ground, turned by my own hands into something alive.
I understand now it was never really about the flowers. It was a belief I carried without knowing its name: that life always finds its way back. That even in the hardest ground, something beautiful can still grow.
That belief is the root of everything in this book. And it’s why, today, part of my legacy is planting trees in places where life was taken - bringing it back, one root at a time.
Exerpt
“My name is Ildiko. It is a Hungarian name, chosen with quiet deliberation by a mother who understood something about the world she lived in: that some things, if named carefully, cannot be taken away…”
“In the midst of a beautiful childhood…I carried a quiet, persistent ache. I had everything. And I was missing something. I wanted a father. And I wanted a brother. Every day I wrote letters. To God.”
“Her prayer was answered. But the story was just beginning.”
And later:
“Something had changed in me that day that would never change back. The love I have carried for him…began, from that moment, quietly and permanently, to die. In its place grew something else. Something cold and clear and entirely justified. Disgust. I was ten years old. And I was already surviving.”
About ildiko
I was born in Baile Felix, Romania, a small thermal-spring town where my mother worked as a nurse, and my grandmother managed a retreat for the country’s elite. I grew up speaking Hungarian and Romanian, caught between two cultures, two languages, two versions of who I was allowed to be. Behind the walls of an ordinary-looking home, I learned early to carry silence. I learned to survive. And eventually, I learned to leave - crossing a border to Hungary, and later building a life that was entirely my own.
Letters to God - is my first book. I wrote it at sixty-six, from a place of peace rather than pain - not to relieve what happened, but to show what’s possible on the other side of it. Today, I live in New York, where I continue to write, speak, and explore the next chapter of my own story.