Dead Mom Talking
A Memoir-Album about Grief, Magic, Motherhood, and the Love That Lasts Beyond Life
Author/Artist
Lindsay White
Genre
Book: Nonfiction / Memoir / Spirituality / Grief & Healing
Album: Folk / Americana / Blues / Indie
Project Summary
Love is a trip, and so is this book.
Dead Mom Talking is an unconventional memoir-album hybrid that weaves nonfiction narrative with songwriting to explore my estrangement from my mother, shaped by the tension between my queer identity and her Christian faith. After her untimely death from brain cancer, we found our way back to each other through mediumship sessions that defied my own skepticism. This book traces my journey, not just as a daughter navigating loss, but as a mother learning how to break cycles of trauma, build a family, and leave a legacy of love.
Dead Mom Talking challenges the Western narratives that dismiss spiritual experiences as unscientific, love as conditional, and grief as something to "get over." At its heart, it asks:
This book is for readers seeking healing, connection, and permission to reimagine relationships in and beyond the physical world.
Beyond mesmerizing moments of personal encounters with the beyond, Dead Mom Talking carries a broader message of interconnectedness and our collective responsibility to love and protect one another—especially our children.
A Memoir-Album about Grief, Magic, Motherhood, and the Love That Lasts Beyond Life
Author/Artist
Lindsay White
Genre
Book: Nonfiction / Memoir / Spirituality / Grief & Healing
Album: Folk / Americana / Blues / Indie
Project Summary
Love is a trip, and so is this book.
Dead Mom Talking is an unconventional memoir-album hybrid that weaves nonfiction narrative with songwriting to explore my estrangement from my mother, shaped by the tension between my queer identity and her Christian faith. After her untimely death from brain cancer, we found our way back to each other through mediumship sessions that defied my own skepticism. This book traces my journey, not just as a daughter navigating loss, but as a mother learning how to break cycles of trauma, build a family, and leave a legacy of love.
Dead Mom Talking challenges the Western narratives that dismiss spiritual experiences as unscientific, love as conditional, and grief as something to "get over." At its heart, it asks:
- What if love and the ability to express it transcends time and space?
- Can grief be a portal for deeper understanding?
- How do we learn to love each other—radically, relentlessly, and without condition?
This book is for readers seeking healing, connection, and permission to reimagine relationships in and beyond the physical world.
Beyond mesmerizing moments of personal encounters with the beyond, Dead Mom Talking carries a broader message of interconnectedness and our collective responsibility to love and protect one another—especially our children.
Components
Dead Mom Talking is
Dead Mom Talking is
- A memoir (physical, digital, and audiobook).
- A companion album featuring original songs that give voice to the emotions, lessons, and transformations uncovered in the book. Each chapter of the book maps to a song on the album.
WRITING
The below is an excerpt from the manuscript recounting my first accidental mediumship encounter with my deceased mother. Think of it as a jumping off point, as these encounters become more intense, detailed, and meaningful as I found my bearings and learned how to communicate with the loving energy that survived beyond my mother's human form.
Just a few nights later, I was meditating in the bathtub (meditubbing?) yet again. Yes, I basically hung out in a soup of myself chatting with the Universe every night in an attempt to wash the mental illness right out of my hair. You survive a pandemic your way, I’ll survive mine, okurrr? I had just finished thanking my body H2T (<-- that’s head-to-toe for anyone unfamiliar with the classic, albeit problematic, television program America’s Next Top Model). Normally after this ritual, I’d move straight away into visualizing a space (aka the seaside house of my dreams, complete with kitchen island, a music room, a giant gather-round-y’all dining table, a big backyard for my kid and community events, a granny flat for my dad, and an ensuite restroom with a stone-tiled shower and a beautiful - you guessed it- mothaeffin bathtubbbbb!) where I could cultivate my values - safety, stability, serenity, creativity, community, compassion, family, rest, and joy - under one roof. You know, Oprah stuff. But that night, instead of visualizing, I decided to reach out to Mom again.
Mama, Mama, Mama, I murmured soft and low. I love you. I miss you. Protect me. Come see me. I called to other lost loved ones as well. My Grandma Ollie. My Grandpa Bethel. My Poppa Bill. Jeffrey Joe. My sweet Uncle Calvin, who had just passed due to health complications after a battle with Covid. But mostly, Mama, Mama, Mama. Mama, Mama, Mama.
Even though I have never done this during any meditation, I lifted my left hand out of the water, and with my thumb and index finger, gently grasped the charm of my necklace. Which used to be my mother’s necklace. One that I haven’t taken off for years. A sparkly triangle little thing from Bloomingdale's that I couldn’t afford, but bought for her anyway during one of many unsuccessful attempts at reconciliation. I liked how there were three sides: one for her, one for me, one for my sister. And since all of our words continued to fail us back then, I thought when I purchased it that maybe that shiny little triad could communicate these things for me: I miss you. I love you. Don’t leave me.
Suddenly, my two fingers started pinching the triangle charm with full force. They gripped to the point of ouch, ouch, ouch as the little corners dug into my skin. Kinda spooked, I focused my thoughts on making it stop, and it stopped. I let go of the necklace and examined the triangle imprint it had left on my fingers. What the hell just happened? It reminded me of a Reiki session many years ago with my healer friend Liz where I experienced something similar—a super strong, involuntary grip of a heart-shaped rose quartz crystal.
Is Mom actually listening to me? Is she HERE? In the TUB? I grabbed the necklace again and almost immediately, my two fingers re-gripped the triangle charm with a level of strength that surprised me. I’m the girl that can’t open pickle jars or play bar chords for more than an hour before needing a break. This amount of force was coming from somewhere (or someone?) else.
And then, without releasing the grip of the necklace, my whole arm started moving back and forth, slowly and gently at first. Eyes still closed, almost locked shut, I started talking to Mom. I wish I could tell you exactly what I said, but it was just a big energetic blur of crying and whispers and arm-shaking, topped with what was probably the most awestruck widespread grin I've ever grinned, stretching itself across my face like a freshly laundered fitted sheet on a California King. I wish there was video footage of it for you to laugh at. I blurted out everything I would say to her if some genie had granted me a wish to see her for two minutes. All the words were somehow stacked on top of each other like burger toppings. No, more like melted into each other like pizza toppings. (I haven’t eaten very much today and it’s interjecting itself into my writing).
Mostly, I just kept repeating: I love you. I’m sorry. I love you. I’m sorry. Over and over and over and over, my arm rocking back and forth all the while. And I don’t know how, but I also mustered up the nerve to ask a question: Do you love me, Mom?
And that’s when shit got wild. As soon as the question mark dove off my tongue and into the rising steam, my arm was not my arm anymore. It was Mom’s love, and she was basically beating me with it. My hand (still hanging onto the necklace) pounded against my chest and retracted with such force that I’m kinda surprised the necklace didn’t rip right off my body, crash through the wall like the Kool-Aid man, and land in the neighbor’s driveway.
Warmth and happiness and peace came over me. I could feel the energy start to dissipate and my hand finally chilled out. The grieving, motherless Lindsay I’d come to know over the last several years might’ve said: I miss you. I love you. Don’t leave me. But what actually came out of my mouth in these final meditative moments was: Thank you, Mama. The charm slipped out of my fingers, but my index lingered on my thumb, gently rubbing it back and forth like a tiny bow on a tiny violin. There, there. The smallest gesture. The biggest comfort.
Just like that, it was over. I got out of the tub and put on Mom’s oversized knitted poncho. The one I wore for, I dunno, fifteen thousand days straight with no shower breaks after she died. I sprayed her perfume in the air around me.
I called my sister, and we cried. I knew she would find a similar sense of comfort from Mom’s visit. Haley, the theatre buff / writer / actor / director / filmmaker, has always embodied a strong sense of whimsy and wonder that makes it super duper easy for her to suspend disbelief.
Audrie was another story, though. Pragmatic as they come. Watches way too many scary movies and grew up way too Catholic to fuck around with anything dead or undead.
I sat on the couch, waited for her to come home from work, and told her all about it, trying as her skeptical eyes stared back at me not to talk myself out of the miraculous possibility that maybe, just maybe, life and love and forgiveness and acceptance and redemption could actually exist and extend somewhere beyond a mother’s death and a daughter’s grief.
Just a few nights later, I was meditating in the bathtub (meditubbing?) yet again. Yes, I basically hung out in a soup of myself chatting with the Universe every night in an attempt to wash the mental illness right out of my hair. You survive a pandemic your way, I’ll survive mine, okurrr? I had just finished thanking my body H2T (<-- that’s head-to-toe for anyone unfamiliar with the classic, albeit problematic, television program America’s Next Top Model). Normally after this ritual, I’d move straight away into visualizing a space (aka the seaside house of my dreams, complete with kitchen island, a music room, a giant gather-round-y’all dining table, a big backyard for my kid and community events, a granny flat for my dad, and an ensuite restroom with a stone-tiled shower and a beautiful - you guessed it- mothaeffin bathtubbbbb!) where I could cultivate my values - safety, stability, serenity, creativity, community, compassion, family, rest, and joy - under one roof. You know, Oprah stuff. But that night, instead of visualizing, I decided to reach out to Mom again.
Mama, Mama, Mama, I murmured soft and low. I love you. I miss you. Protect me. Come see me. I called to other lost loved ones as well. My Grandma Ollie. My Grandpa Bethel. My Poppa Bill. Jeffrey Joe. My sweet Uncle Calvin, who had just passed due to health complications after a battle with Covid. But mostly, Mama, Mama, Mama. Mama, Mama, Mama.
Even though I have never done this during any meditation, I lifted my left hand out of the water, and with my thumb and index finger, gently grasped the charm of my necklace. Which used to be my mother’s necklace. One that I haven’t taken off for years. A sparkly triangle little thing from Bloomingdale's that I couldn’t afford, but bought for her anyway during one of many unsuccessful attempts at reconciliation. I liked how there were three sides: one for her, one for me, one for my sister. And since all of our words continued to fail us back then, I thought when I purchased it that maybe that shiny little triad could communicate these things for me: I miss you. I love you. Don’t leave me.
Suddenly, my two fingers started pinching the triangle charm with full force. They gripped to the point of ouch, ouch, ouch as the little corners dug into my skin. Kinda spooked, I focused my thoughts on making it stop, and it stopped. I let go of the necklace and examined the triangle imprint it had left on my fingers. What the hell just happened? It reminded me of a Reiki session many years ago with my healer friend Liz where I experienced something similar—a super strong, involuntary grip of a heart-shaped rose quartz crystal.
Is Mom actually listening to me? Is she HERE? In the TUB? I grabbed the necklace again and almost immediately, my two fingers re-gripped the triangle charm with a level of strength that surprised me. I’m the girl that can’t open pickle jars or play bar chords for more than an hour before needing a break. This amount of force was coming from somewhere (or someone?) else.
And then, without releasing the grip of the necklace, my whole arm started moving back and forth, slowly and gently at first. Eyes still closed, almost locked shut, I started talking to Mom. I wish I could tell you exactly what I said, but it was just a big energetic blur of crying and whispers and arm-shaking, topped with what was probably the most awestruck widespread grin I've ever grinned, stretching itself across my face like a freshly laundered fitted sheet on a California King. I wish there was video footage of it for you to laugh at. I blurted out everything I would say to her if some genie had granted me a wish to see her for two minutes. All the words were somehow stacked on top of each other like burger toppings. No, more like melted into each other like pizza toppings. (I haven’t eaten very much today and it’s interjecting itself into my writing).
Mostly, I just kept repeating: I love you. I’m sorry. I love you. I’m sorry. Over and over and over and over, my arm rocking back and forth all the while. And I don’t know how, but I also mustered up the nerve to ask a question: Do you love me, Mom?
And that’s when shit got wild. As soon as the question mark dove off my tongue and into the rising steam, my arm was not my arm anymore. It was Mom’s love, and she was basically beating me with it. My hand (still hanging onto the necklace) pounded against my chest and retracted with such force that I’m kinda surprised the necklace didn’t rip right off my body, crash through the wall like the Kool-Aid man, and land in the neighbor’s driveway.
Warmth and happiness and peace came over me. I could feel the energy start to dissipate and my hand finally chilled out. The grieving, motherless Lindsay I’d come to know over the last several years might’ve said: I miss you. I love you. Don’t leave me. But what actually came out of my mouth in these final meditative moments was: Thank you, Mama. The charm slipped out of my fingers, but my index lingered on my thumb, gently rubbing it back and forth like a tiny bow on a tiny violin. There, there. The smallest gesture. The biggest comfort.
Just like that, it was over. I got out of the tub and put on Mom’s oversized knitted poncho. The one I wore for, I dunno, fifteen thousand days straight with no shower breaks after she died. I sprayed her perfume in the air around me.
I called my sister, and we cried. I knew she would find a similar sense of comfort from Mom’s visit. Haley, the theatre buff / writer / actor / director / filmmaker, has always embodied a strong sense of whimsy and wonder that makes it super duper easy for her to suspend disbelief.
Audrie was another story, though. Pragmatic as they come. Watches way too many scary movies and grew up way too Catholic to fuck around with anything dead or undead.
I sat on the couch, waited for her to come home from work, and told her all about it, trying as her skeptical eyes stared back at me not to talk myself out of the miraculous possibility that maybe, just maybe, life and love and forgiveness and acceptance and redemption could actually exist and extend somewhere beyond a mother’s death and a daughter’s grief.
MUSIC
Dead Mom Talking is structured similarly to a traditional song, with verse sections describing important scenes, a bridge section that offers unique perspectives, and a chorus section that drives home universal messages of healing through grief, learning from harm, and loving through life. Each chapter of the book is titled after and accompanied by an original song that speaks to the themes and scenes outlined. I've sprinkled in some live links below; as we make progress on professional recordings, I will share excerpts here.
Introduction: Ready to be Read
Verse 1
Chapter 1: Even Roots Change
Chapter 2: Run
Chapter 3: What Am I?
Chapter 4: I Am What I Am
Chapter 5: Reverse Abortion
Chapter 6: Desert Wild
Chapter 7: Cheese Enchiladas
Verse 2
Chapter 8: Crooked on the Nail
Chapter 9: I Wish You Were Alive
Chapter 10: What Even is Life?
Chapter 11: Time is On the Way
Chapter 12: High Horse
Chapter 13: Well Enough Alone
Bridge
Chapter 14: Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu
Chapter 15: Roses Are Dead
Chapter 16: The Magic's In Me
Chapter 17: Ego
Chapter 18: Lemonade
Chapter 19: River
CHORUS
Chapter 20: Fortunate Fucker
Chapter 21: We Will
Introduction: Ready to be Read
Verse 1
Chapter 1: Even Roots Change
Chapter 2: Run
Chapter 3: What Am I?
Chapter 4: I Am What I Am
Chapter 5: Reverse Abortion
Chapter 6: Desert Wild
Chapter 7: Cheese Enchiladas
Verse 2
Chapter 8: Crooked on the Nail
Chapter 9: I Wish You Were Alive
Chapter 10: What Even is Life?
Chapter 11: Time is On the Way
Chapter 12: High Horse
Chapter 13: Well Enough Alone
Bridge
Chapter 14: Lokah Samastah Sukhino Bhavantu
Chapter 15: Roses Are Dead
Chapter 16: The Magic's In Me
Chapter 17: Ego
Chapter 18: Lemonade
Chapter 19: River
CHORUS
Chapter 20: Fortunate Fucker
Chapter 21: We Will
Platform & Marketability
I have spent nearly two decades as an independent artist, writer, and community organizer, building a dedicated audience across music, publishing, and advocacy.
I have spent nearly two decades as an independent artist, writer, and community organizer, building a dedicated audience across music, publishing, and advocacy.
- Music Career – Two LPs, 14 singles, two-time San Diego Music Award winner, press features in American Songwriter, The Advocate, Relix, LGBT Weekly, and more.
- Independent Publishing Experience – Founder of Qulyn Journals, independently published multiple works including a pro-choice zine, a nonfiction narrative essay on mental health, and a DIY PR guide for artists.
- Community Organizing – Founder of Lady Brain Collective, recognized by Mayor Todd Gloria’s Women of Distinction Awards. Curator of Songwriter Sanctuary, monthly local songwriter series. Volunteer with We All We Got grassroots local mutual aid.
- Audience Reach – 1,500+ email subscribers, strong social media presence, and industry relationships to support book/album promotion. Additionally, the album element of Dead Mom Talking will serve as a unique promotional tool, broadening the book’s reach through streaming platforms, live performances, and media features.
Relevance
Dead Mom Talking arrives at a crucial moment, with families and communities increasingly fractured by politics, religion, and cultural expectations. Queer and trans individuals face increasing attacks, often at the hands of their own families and faith communities. Meanwhile, interest in metaphysical experiences, consciousness studies, and collective healing is growing and gaining legitimacy as a way to frame our experiences and existence.
Dead Mom Talking offers not only a personal story of mother-daughter reconciliation but also a larger blueprint for challenging systems that prioritize wealth and power over love and care.This isn’t just another grief memoir—it’s a call to action, an invitation to reimagine how we love, parent, and exist in relation to one another.
Dead Mom Talking arrives at a crucial moment, with families and communities increasingly fractured by politics, religion, and cultural expectations. Queer and trans individuals face increasing attacks, often at the hands of their own families and faith communities. Meanwhile, interest in metaphysical experiences, consciousness studies, and collective healing is growing and gaining legitimacy as a way to frame our experiences and existence.
Dead Mom Talking offers not only a personal story of mother-daughter reconciliation but also a larger blueprint for challenging systems that prioritize wealth and power over love and care.This isn’t just another grief memoir—it’s a call to action, an invitation to reimagine how we love, parent, and exist in relation to one another.
What I'm Seeking
I am seeking a publishing partner, literary agent, and/or funding to support the development and promotion of Dead Mom Talking. Opportunities for investment include:
For inquiries about publishing, investment, or collaboration, or to request a formal proposal, please complete the form below.
I am seeking a publishing partner, literary agent, and/or funding to support the development and promotion of Dead Mom Talking. Opportunities for investment include:
- Publishing & Distribution – Traditional or independent release support.
- Music Production – Funding for the companion album and multimedia elements.
- Marketing & Promotion – PR, media placements, live performances/readings, and community engagement.
For inquiries about publishing, investment, or collaboration, or to request a formal proposal, please complete the form below.
Partners
Music Production Team:
Will Stucky
Rachel Hall
Jules Stewart
Veronica May
Lizzie Wann
...more TBD
Supported By:
Steam Engine Foundation
Atelier Artist in Residence
Raspberry Management
Friends, Family, and Patreon subscribers!
Music Production Team:
Will Stucky
Rachel Hall
Jules Stewart
Veronica May
Lizzie Wann
...more TBD
Supported By:
Steam Engine Foundation
Atelier Artist in Residence
Raspberry Management
Friends, Family, and Patreon subscribers!
