If I Knew Then: Finding Wisdom in Failure and Power in Aging

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Jann Arden--bestselling author, recording artist and late-blooming TV star--is back with this funny, heartfelt and fierce memoir on becoming a woman of a certain age. The power, gravity and freedom she's found at fifty-seven are superpowers she believes all of us can unleash.

Digging deep into her strengths, her failures and her losses, Jann Arden brings us an inspiring account of how she has surprised herself, in her fifties, by at last becoming completely her own person. Like many women, it took Jann a long time to realize that trying to be pleasing and likeable and beautiful in the eyes of others was a loser's game. Letting it rip, and damning the consequences, is not only liberating, it's a hell of a lot of fun: "Being the age I am--that so many women are--is just the best time of my life."

Jann weaves her own story together with tales of her mother, grandmother, and great grandmother, and the father she came close to hating, to show her younger self--and all of us--that fear and avoidance is no way to live. "What I'm thinking about now aren't all the ways I can try to hang on to my youth or all the seconds ticking by in some kind of morbid countdown to death," she writes, "but rather how I keep becoming someone I always hoped I could be. If I'm lucky one day a very old face will look back at me from the mirror, a face I once shied away from. I will love that old woman ferociously, because she has finally figured out how to live a life of purpose--not in spite of but because of all her mistakes and failures."

Publisher: Vintage Books Canada
Published: 03/15/2022
Pages: 216
Weight: 0.42lbs
Size: 8.08h x 5.31w x 0.58d
ISBN: 9780735279995

About the Author
JANN ARDEN is a singer, songwriter, actor, author and social media star. The celebrated multi-platinum, award-winning artist was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 2020. She continues to record and tour, and in early 2022 will release her fifteenth studio album, Descendant. She has written four books, including a memoir of her early life and path to music, Falling Backwards, and her two #1 bestsellers, Feeding My Mother and If I Knew Then. She is the star of her own hit TV sitcom, Jann, which debuted in 2019 and recently aired its third season. She also hosts the weekly Jann Arden Podcast, exploring what makes humans authentically themselves.