One Year Away — a memoir by Martina Ruiz
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My mother was 36 years old when she died.
This year, I turn 35.
That one fact is the reason this book exists.
One Year Away book cover
About the Book

The question that changed everything.

For most of my life, that number silently shaped the way I saw the world. Long before I understood grief, I was learning how to survive it.

One Year Away is the story of what happened between losing my mother at nine years old and becoming the woman standing just one year away from the age she never got to pass. It's a journey through loss, identity, healing, and the small daily choices that slowly transformed my life.

More than a memoir, this is an invitation to reflect on your own story. To question the beliefs you've carried, embrace the possibility of change, and remember that your past may shape you, but it doesn't have to define you.

The moment you begin writing your own story is the moment everything starts to change.

From the Pages
Once you survive the thing you were most afraid of, the worst thing you could imagine, it changes your relationship with fear forever. Chasing the Feeling
Maybe healing was never about becoming someone new. Maybe it was always about returning to who you were beneath it all, long before the world told you who to be. The Lightest Version of Me
I have become the author of my own life, instead of a character trapped inside a story someone else wrote. Who I Am
None of us have the power to go back and change the past. But all of us have the power to create a future to look forward to. Who I Am
About the Author

Martina Ruiz

Author  ·  Storyteller  ·  Seeker

Martina Ruiz is a writer from New York who has rebuilt herself several times. She writes about grief, healing, identity, and the small daily choices that change a life, drawing from her own journey of loss and reinvention.

She believes everyone carries a story worth telling, and that the act of facing our own is where real change begins. One Year Away is her first book, written in the year before she turns the age her mother never got to pass.

This is where the conversation begins.
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