A true story, both tragic and redemptive, This Life Is in Your Hands tells of the quest to make a good life, the role of fate, and the power of forgiveness.

In the fall of 1968, Melissa Coleman's parents pack their VW truck and set out to forge a new existence on a rugged coastal homestead. Inspired by Helen and Scott Nearing, authors of the homesteading bible Living the Good Life, Eliot and Sue build their own home by hand, live off the crops they grow, and establish a happy family with Melissa and her two sisters. They also attract national media and become icons of the back-to-the-land farming movement, but the pursuit of a purer, simpler life comes at a price. In the wake of a tragic accident, idealism gives way to human frailty, and by the fall of 1978, Greenwood Farm is abandoned. The search to understand what happened is at the heart of this luminous, heartbreaking, and ultimately redemptive memoir.

Choices are hard. Melissa "chose" the conventional life in the way most people choose a conventional life; it seemed to simply happen to her. So, she chose to be a "happily" married mother and nurse, living a quiet, simple life. A good life. The kind of life her mother lived, and her mother before her. Until she couldn't bear it anymore. A colicky baby. Postpartum depression. A sense of the walls closing in. A moment of desperate inspiration. A baby product. What started at her dining room table as a basket and unique fabric liner eventually reached overseas production, international distribution to five countries and the shelves of such giants as Target and Babies"R"Us. Ultimately, to be acquired by a large juvenile company in 2011. Melissa tried to walk both roads at once. But she was like a blind, obsessed traveler. A sensible person would have given up. But it was a "sensible" traveler who had opted for the conventional life to begin with. So, though the process was as frustrating and hopeless as moving sand from one end of the beach to the other, Melissa could not stop. She would not. A passion had overtaken her. Her idea, her invention, would not die. It had become her only hope for her emotional survival. Disasters and tears outweighed the victories ten-to-one during those seven years. A second colicky baby, a crippling postpartum depression with flashes of psychosis, a mother losing her battle to pancreatic cancer, a nervous breakdown and lockup, a flailing business that survived the 2008-09 economic crisis, an affair, a tenacious, bottomless bottle of vodka, one foot in the door of bankruptcy, divorce. Ultimately, there were two roads. The conventional, a marriage and family with everything done according to plan. The other, a business where everything was essentially done wrong. One led to failure. The other to success and the rebirth of a new woman, a woman who found a way to her true self, true happiness and even contentment for her family and herself.