Self-Assembly

For readers of Leslie Jamison and Nora Ephron, a memoir told in essays and lyrical fragments about outgrowing the life you’ve built—by choice or by force—and assembling yourself into someone new.

One Tuesday in Kyiv, Katya Andresen discovered the marriage she thought she was holding together had already come undone. Within forty-eight hours, she went from expat wife to single working mother with no permanent address—and on the hook for a business book contract she no longer had the heart to finish. That unraveling became the catalyst for a very different kind of story: this one.

Self-Assembly is a memoir told in essays, letters, lists, and lyrical fragments about what it means to keep becoming—across careers and conflict zones, marriages and miscarriages, continents and identities. It moves with curious energy through the moments that split a life open and demand you reconfigure everything you knew, with no blueprint and no tidy lessons waiting at the end.

In science, self-assembly is the process by which scattered molecules spontaneously organize into something new and whole. In life, it’s what women do when the version of themselves they’ve been living no longer fits. This book is not a manual for reinvention. It is a mirror: wry, unsparing, and deeply companionable for any woman who is quietly rebuilding herself while still living her life.