Patricia Hetherington’s career path has encompassed teaching, training,
and selling real estate for twenty years. At midlife she changed gears to complete a master’s degree, becoming a counsellor and publishing a memoir
The Winter Gardener: A Woman’s Journey from Futile to Fertile (2007).She has walked unharmed on hot coals to impress a new lover and trekked the Camino de Santiago in Spain. In 2016 she quit her day job, throwing back the covers and pushing forward to publish a new book.

My soul sparked a desire to burn off the constraints of my life, to allow something ancient and sacred to emerge-something larger, more beautiful, and unfurled..

Chapter 6 “The Gift,” Under The Covers.

Patricia Hetherington lives on the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia,Canada. She is the author of Under the Covers: A Life of Gumption, Passion, Gifts, and Secrets (2017) and The Winter Gardener: A Woman’s Journey from Futile to Fertile (2007).

“An unflinching response to life runs through this rich collection. At once poignant, sensuous, and entertaining.”
Susan Page

Executive Director San Miguel Writers' Conference and Literary Festival

“A bold memoir of love and despair, Hetherington’s Under the Covers reads like a ticking time bomb. So powerful is her prose that she had me on the edge of my chair. Here is an author riding roughshod over herself in the service of truth and self-discovery. I found myself speed-reading, as if the pages might self-destruct.”
PJ Reece

Author of Story Structure Expedition and Story Structure to Die For

Under the Covers

A life of Gumption, Passion, Gifts & Secrets

“Whether you are a mental health professional, a reader looking for a compelling story or an all too frail and wonderful human being hoping to find companionship on a sometimes lonely road, Under the Covers will befriend, inform and hypnotize you. This is the author’s intimate tale of her struggles and delight in living with a mind that doesn’t always behave in the way she would prefer and living a life, as so many of us find, that doesn’t always go the way she wants. Here is a feast of ‘insider knowledge’ about mental health interwoven with glimpses of a family’s story and day to day life on the west coast.”
Arden Henley Ed.D, RCC

Vice President and Principal, Canadian Programs , City University

“OMG I could not put this beautiful book down. Having a loved one who has mental health challenges, I appreciate Patricia’s full expression of these challenges so that others can be drawn toward their own light.”
Susan S. Freeman

Executive coach, Speaker and Author

“Authentic, gritty, sometimes whimsical. This is a telling of one woman’s willingness to pay the price for fashioning a life she could call her own by drawing upon the strength and wisdom of her courageous forebears.”
Annette Aubrey

Reg. MSW, Facilitator Systemic Family Constellations

Why you’ll

love it

E

This evocative collection of linked stories explores the hope, heartache, and messiness of love and life, revealing how, in the deepest corners of our beings, we long for healing.

Sneak Peek

Inspiring Stories

E

Patricia invokes the presence of her deceased grandmother in a reverie and they reminisce while waiting for a resistant story to emerge. While she navigates the treacherous terrains of family sewing traditions and Spain’s gruelling cross-country pilgrims’ trail, unexpected truths are found in the depths of transformation. A woman’s quest for the perfect cinnamon bun becomes a metaphor for living without regret. Lessons passed from mother to daughter hinge on choosing the perfect coat. But when a crisis inspires the wrong purchase, a mysterious appearance delivers redemption. Through dance comes reckoning-with yearning for fatherly love, with confronting her own raw sexuality, and by accepting the harsh truths of aging. An old flame ignites an obsession and a gutsy reflection yields a potentially life-changing insight. Reaching a tipping point of overwhelm and panic spurs the exploration of harrowing episodes, and wholeness is found in a powerful naming. After a decade of maintaining a rambling heritage home on her own, Patricia feels bitterness rise in herself and slips away from her annual Christmas party. Faced with their father’s impending death, she and her sister, Joann, sense the arrival of their mother from her heavenly abode, which allows them to be together as a family once more.

With intelligent, clear-eyed prose, these stories reach into the heart of what it means to be a woman fully alive to her inner and outer worlds. Lyrical, sensuous, and unflinching, Under the Covers: A Life of Gumption, Passion, Gifts, and Secrets is a poignant, entertaining testimony to a life lived authentically.

Communique

PATRICIA HETHERINGTON

The Writing Way

News

             BLOG

Embracing the Present

Embracing the Present

On an impulse, I embraced the idea of wearing my (August 1986) Wedding Dress to a White Gala. Once a sacred garment, 33 years later it becomes a glorious costume … an expression of playful, powerful feminine energy.

read more
Out of the Blue

Out of the Blue

Let's begin with 2 photos from 2018 My daughter Sarah makes a surprise visit to Susan Page—my first reader and executive director San Miguel Writers' Conference and Literary Festival (above) ******* See Susan's endorsement on back cover (below) January 1, 2019 I turn...

read more
Book Reading Morphs into Something More!

Book Reading Morphs into Something More!

By now you've published your book, your launch event as reported by the arts columnist was a "polished performance" … "set the bar for stylish author readings." Reviewers on Amazon call your book of stories stunning, poignant, and heartbreakingly honest. Online sales...

read more
Shortlist AWARD Announcement

Shortlist AWARD Announcement

Congratulations to Patricia Hetherington, whose book Under the Covers: A Life of Gumption, Passion, Gifts, and Secrets has been nominated for the Whistler Independent Book Award.

read more

Get In Touch

6 + 11 =

photo copyright Ingeborg Suzanne Hardman | site copyright Patricia Hetherington

Photography & Web design
Share This