Joy Rising is not a memoir about a perfect life. It’s a collection of stories from a real one.

With humor, candor, and hard-won grace, Carolyn Pistone explores joy not as a personality trait or a spiritual bypass, but as a practice–one that can co-exist with trauma, grief, injustice, aging, anger, pleasure, and hope.

In this audiobook, you’ll travel across continents and across decades. You’ll meet dancers and prisoners, foster children and veterans, strangers and lovers. You’ll encounter joy in hospital rooms, protest lines, bedrooms, boardrooms, and ordinary Tuesdays. You will see how joy can be reclaimed after loss, defended in the face of cruelty, and shared as an act of resistance.

Joy Rising doesn’t promise easy answers or constant happiness. What it offers instead is companionship, perspective, laughter, and the reminder that joy is not something you earn–it’s something you are.

A fierce, funny, and deeply human exploration of joy as survival, resistance, and birthright–told by someone who has lived it!