An Author’s Note

Sophie Marino is a pen name.

I choose to write under one for two reasons: so I can tell the truth, in its entirety, without fear—and to protect my daughters.

I craft each sentence, paragraph, and page with intention, to tell a story I hope carries meaning. I chose the name with that same intention—one that would hold the woman I’ve become through surviving an abusive marriage, fighting the systems that trapped me in that abuse even after divorce, and healing from it all.

Sophie means wisdom. Wisdom wasn’t handed to me. It was earned—built over years of hard experience, each challenge a lesson, each day spent teaching myself the law I was never meant to understand and finding the practices to recover from each battle.

Marino means of the sea. The sea is where I return. The shoreline is my refuge—where I ground myself and spend silent moments in reflection.

The woman behind the name is a mother, a fighter, a writer, a memoir author, a lover of animals, nature, and music.

I reach for mother first. When my identity was stripped away—my home, my independence, even my purpose—being a mother was the one part of myself I still knew. Through the darkest years, I found light in loving my two daughters, and in the light they somehow kept burning in themselves.

That light carried us through. But surviving is not the same as living, and love alone was not enough to keep them safe. I became a fighter. Protecting my daughters became my purpose, and somewhere in that fight I found a strength I hadn’t known was there, and a voice I thought was gone.

I found myself again in the work of healing, and stepped into a life of my own making, full of clarity, peace, and love.

These days, my greatest comfort is writing. Putting my story into words has become its own kind of therapy—a way to make sense of it and preserve what mattered.

I believe in the idea of energy return, and I live each day with that in mind. I believe everything happens for a reason, and that it’s our job to find the reason in the happening. I believe in signs—and when I need one, I turn to music, blindly choosing one of my perfectly curated Pandora stations and taking the first song as a message that calmer moments are somewhere on the horizon.

I am grateful for the pain that sits beside the joy, the hard years that taught me to trust myself, the wisdom those years left behind, and the love that surrounded all of it. Every morning, I walk my dog to the shore and pause at the tideline in gratitude, out in the open air, where the world feels quiet and simple.