Looking for Love

What does a life look like when it is built on a foundation that was broken before it had a chance to set?

Sandra Joy was twelve years old when her brother traded her for sex. That single act - and the warped understanding of love and worth it created - became the lens through which she navigated everything that followed: relationships, motherhood, faith, money, addiction, homelessness, and the recurring question of whether her life was worth continuing.

Looking for Love is her memoir. It is structured not as a chronology but as a reckoning - moving through the phases of a life shaped by one event, tracing the cause and effect of decisions made by a child who grew up before she was ready.

Sandra has been clinically dead, in a coma, unconscious, and paralysed - on separate occasions. She has been anorexic and obese, the class clown and the quiet one sobbing inside. She has been a Christian who was sold for sex at twelve, raped by a boyfriend, and who later became a sex addict and a prostitute. She wrote a drug policy for a company while dealing drugs from the car park. She has been the woman who gave everything away, and the woman who had nothing left to give.

She is also a mother of three children who, she believes, would have been better off without her - and who are, by any measure, remarkable human beings.

This is not a memoir of trauma for its own sake. Sandra agreed to write it on one condition: it had to be motivational, not a sob story. What emerged is a book for anyone who has ever wondered what is really happening beneath the surface of someone who looks like they have it together, or someone who clearly doesn't. For anyone who has loved a person they couldn't reach. For anyone who has been that person.

The title came after the first draft was written, as titles often do. Sandra had planned to write about surviving one event. Instead she wrote about something she hadn't realised she'd been doing her whole life - looking for love. Something she didn't know was an option.

And I survived, she writes at the end of the prologue.

And you will too.

Looking for Love is Sandra Joy's debut memoir. She is a publishing consultant and author based in Australia.