“One life I’ve lived was liminal — I was not what I had been, but I had yet to become what I will be.”

In her memoir Crowded Tables and Bonus Tracks, Ashley McLain moves from an adopted child in 1970s Dallas to a pioneering environmental consultant who cofounded and sold a thriving company. At fifty-three, she found the courage to search for her biological family, confronting questions of identity, belonging, and what it means to define “enough.”

Blending vivid storytelling with reflections on leadership, legacy, and cultural expectations, McLain celebrates the people who shaped her, the resilience forged through loss and reinvention, and the freedom in letting go.

Crowded Tables and Bonus Tracks speaks to anyone ready to honor the past while daring to write the next chapter.