An Interview with Leslie Reta

Leslie Reta is an author, trainer, coach, and advocate with over twenty years of experience working with families impacted by abuse, neglect, trauma, and addiction. Her work combines professional experience with a deeply personal understanding of what it means to love someone struggling with addiction while trying to protect the people caught in the middle.

Through her books, Always, Forever and The Space Between Safety and Survival, Leslie explores the parts of survival people don’t always talk about.

Known for her raw honesty, occasional profanity, and refusal to sugarcoat the uncomfortable, she writes for people still figuring out who they are after everything they’ve survived.

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What inspired you to start writing this book?

It started one night in October 2025, after I’d finished searching morgue records to see whether Chris, my former husband, was alive or dead.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the first time I’d done that.

But that night hit differently.

I remember holding my breath, terrified I’d find his name. And when the screen came back with “no records found,” I completely lost it.

I sobbed. Uncontrollably.

Maybe it was relief. Maybe it was the fact that I hadn’t heard anything about him in over a year. Or maybe it was everything I’d spent years holding together finally catching up with me.

I honestly don’t know.

What I do know is that I had too many feelings and nowhere to put them. So, I opened my computer … and started typing.

And I kept typing.

Years of memories, heartbreak, anger, fear, love … all the s*** I’d spent so much time carrying around because I didn’t know what else to do with it.

Some of it I’d written about before. Some of it I hadn’t allowed myself to think about in years. And some of it hurt a hell of a lot more than I expected when I finally put it into words.

It was therapeutic. Painful as hell at times, but therapeutic.

I had absolutely no intention of writing a book.

And then somehow, there was one.

… And then there was a second.

Tell us the story of your book’s current title. Was it easy to find, or did it take forever?

The title was probably the easiest part of writing the book.

When Chris and I were teenagers, we had this little exchange we’d say before hanging up the phone.

“Dream of me.”

“Always.”

“Sleep with me.”

“Forever.”

Over time, four lines became two words.

“Always.”

“Forever.”

It was just ours. Something we’d said to each other for years, long before addiction, marriage, divorce, and everything that came afterward.

In January 2023, after more than a year without hearing from him, I picked Chris up from a trap house to take him to the hospital. He was sick, shaking, and had a broken hand and a 102-degree fever.

When he got into my car, he whispered, “Always.”

And without even thinking, I answered, “Forever.”

After everything we’d been through, those words were still there.

It wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t a promise that things would get better. It was years of history wrapped up in two words.

So, when it came time to give the book a title, there really wasn’t anything else I could have called it.

Always, Forever.

Describe your dream book cover.

My favorite cover is actually from my second book, The Space Between Safety and Survival.

It’s a real photograph of Kay and me feeding ducks at a pond during the time of Chris’s first arrest.

At first glance, it’s just a mom and her little girl spending time together. Nothing particularly remarkable about it.

But when I look at that picture now, I see something completely different.

You can see it in my body language. How much I was carrying. How hard I was trying to hold everything together while still making sure my daughter got to be a little girl.

And the crazy thing is, I don’t think I even realized how much of that was showing at the time.

That’s why it’s my favorite. It’s not some perfectly staged photograph or a design someone created to represent survival.

It’s us. In the middle of it.

Long before I ever imagined there would be a book.

If your book had a soundtrack, what are some songs that would be on it?

Two songs immediately come to mind: “More Than a Memory” by Hoobastank and “Only One” by Yellowcard.

“More Than a Memory” holds a ton of significance for me.

After Chris’s first arrest, when we were already legally divorced, we were lying together in the apartment one day and he started singing it to me.

I cried.

I remember that moment so clearly. And listening to the song now, the lyrics say so much more than they did back then.

Although, I think I knew even then. Maybe I just didn’t want to acknowledge what those words would eventually mean.

He would always be more than a memory.

“Only One” by Yellowcard is another one. The lyrics carry a lot of that same weight for me. They meant something to me then, but after everything that’s happened, they hit a hell of a lot differently now.

What other professions have you worked in? What’s something about you that your readers wouldn’t know?

My very first job was at seventeen, working as a paralegal for four criminal defense attorneys.

By nineteen, I was working for the state in child protective services.

I’ve now spent over twenty years working with children and families, from investigating abuse and neglect to family advocacy, prevention, coaching, and training other professionals.

A large part of my career has been spent coaching families through abuse, neglect, addiction, and some pretty difficult shit. Situations where there aren’t always easy answers or quick fixes. More recently, I’ve taken that experience and expanded it into my own coaching practice.

It’s been an interesting career, to say the least.

And somewhere along the way, I apparently decided writing books about my own life was a good idea, too.

Where is your favorite place to write?

My bed. It’s where I’m most comfortable, and where I do some of my best writing.

What advice would you give your past self at the start of your writing journey?

I’d tell myself that it’s going to be okay.

That writing this book is going to be tough as hell.

It wasn’t just about revisiting memories or reliving some of the hardest years of my life. It was about finally allowing myself to feel the emotions that came with those memories. Emotions I’d spent years pushing aside because I was too busy surviving what was happening to actually feel any of it.

Writing Always, Forever was the first time I really allowed myself to feel so much of what I’d been carrying.

I’d also tell myself that people don’t have to understand why I made the choices I did. They weren’t living my life. They didn’t experience what I experienced.

For years, I felt like I needed to explain myself or defend those decisions.

I don’t anymore.

I can tell my story without having to justify how I lived it.

What’s one thing you hope sticks with readers after they finish your book?

I hope readers walk away with a better understanding of what it’s like to love someone struggling with addiction.

It’s easy to look at someone else’s life and question the decisions they made. Why did they stay? Why did they keep helping? Why didn’t they just walk away?

But it’s a hell of a lot different when you’re the one living it.

Addiction doesn’t just affect the person struggling with it. It affects their partners, their children, their families, and the people who spend years trying to help them.

We spend so much time worrying about the person struggling with addiction that we don’t always recognize what it’s doing to us. We start changing how we think, how we act, and what we’re willing to put up with. Somewhere along the way, we can lose sight of ourselves entirely.

We need our own recovery, too. And if there’s one thing I hope readers remember, it’s this: Don’t let yourself disappear from your own story.

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