Suspend all expectations when you open Kristy Halvorsen’s memoir, Perfect Unfolding (Coddiwomple Now, LLC 2026). With raw candor, in fragmented “nomadic mosaic” style like Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, she unveils how she finds herself set loose after her boyfriend leaves. Yet her mom helps her realize her dreams are not crushed but parked in her driveway—if she’s willing to follow them solo.
Halvorsen’s gripping Airstream travel adventure, launched from Havana, Florida, and took her north to Arctic shores. A lyrical gift to humanity, it’s a search for meaning by a woman who comes to realize she can revive her dreams even when they appear dashed.
You’ve heard there are only two plots: a person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Halvorsen’s story covers both disruptions. Her journey outward is also a healing journey inward. Along the way, she encounters life-giving strangers who show her that her honed independence is actually interdependence.
You’ve also heard the writing rule to “show don’t tell.” Again, Halvorsen does both exquisitely. She describes in lush detail her coddiwomple journey to indefinite places, her senses open to exploring off-track. She parks her Airstream, “Coddi,” along rugged shores and lakes with magnificent views and discovers ancient wonders of the natural world.
At the “Eye of Quebec,” Lac Manicouagan, she experiences breath-taking geology, a three-mile crater-impact lake that’s 214 million years old. She’s offered fresh fish and a place by the fire—a repeating pattern:
“The more I opened myself to strangers, dropping my guard…the more abundance flowed.”
Sunset over the mountains turns the lake “every color of the sky.”
She’s already learned that things she thought provided security, like a career with health insurance and retirement as a lieutenant firefighter/paramedic—the first female station officer—had caused an autoimmune disorder from chemical exposure.
Under a vast unpolluted night sky, she feels “both vulnerable and safe. The universe that holds these stars also holds me.” In reading Rumi, she sees through her fear of a judging, punishing God and feels freer. A Division 1 athlete, she’d been warned by her father that “Lesbians run rampant in female sports. They try to recruit, and it’s easy to get sucked in.” From ages thirteen to thirty-seven, “I hid from love, the essence of everything.”
She debates whether to explore the icebergs of Labrador and is told, illogically, “if you don’t, you’ll never know what you missed and regret it the rest of your life.” In Labrador City, she discovers “places that demanded everything of you just to stand in their presence. After years of shedding what no longer served me, I felt ready for that kind of sacred ground.”
She discovers “the real adventure is not on the road; it’s inside dismantling my armor piece by piece.” She realizes that “to wander in the wild is to love with reckless abandon.” She touches an iceberg and fills a bottle with 10,000-year-old ice melt and drinks.
Yet for all her philosophical gleanings, Halvorsen’s writing is full of hilarity too. Her solo journey results in a “broken hitch system” that makes her want her old life back. That is, until she realizes “the grass rope around my heart is made of love—for Life, myself, nature and being of the world and in it.”
Her inspirations are Rumi whose Beloved is Life itself; Charles Bukowski who “taught me to have an edge, be more feral, tell the truth, and not care so much about being judged.” She learns from poet Mary Oliver that “only those lovers who didn’t choose at all but were…chosen …know about love.” She wants to “follow the tickle of my soul,” give up control, and “accept that I live in the unknown.”
She drives five hours from Goose Bay to Port Hope Simpson, Newfoundland (a dreamy Neverland) seeing only virgin, untrammeled wilderness, and feels “lucky to see the cage door standing open.”
She’s in love with life and wonders if it is “playing out the only way it can,” which is her POOF: “What appears to be choice is the whole universe expressing itself…the energy of everything.” She had gone North hoping for adventure and left “with a heart broken wide open.” She writes, “Dimmit, I wish I could drop the silly idea there is risk in love.” Rumi counsels, “Love says…forsake being the candle, savor being the moth.”
She’s invited to a literary festival and realizes “superb writers were regular people with an unquenchable thirst to share their truth.”
In the same weekend, she suffers a bike accident that breaks a rib and mangles her hand, and she comes down with COVID: “I was the forgotten kid again, left to fend for myself” when her parents divorced and her father gained custody. Yet just in time, a hiking physiotherapist appears, reduces (resets) her mangled finger, and she finds again she’s supported by the kindness of strangers.
Throughout, Halvorsen opens our “awes” and tickles our funny bones:
“This miraculous journey has swept me off my feet and dropped me to my knees…I am strummed by divine fingertips.”
She encounters the best town name ever, Come by Chance, but must leave to meet Randy in Dildo and get her computer fixed.
Author Kristy Halvorsen presenting her solo travel hit at Midtown Reader, Tallahassee, December 3, 2025. (Faith Eidse photo)
An author and life coach, Halvorsen encounters many challenges—nearly losing Coddi in a cliff-hanger—and discovers deep, personal and universal truths along the way. We read to soak up her spell-binding experiences but also to learn from what she discovers on her unmapped inward journey. Her memoir recently received an Editors Pick review from Publishers Weekly.
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