Delulu

The story they wrote for you is not the only story. You get to write your own.

Diamond Jasper was four years old when she watched her father kill her mother. She spent the next twenty-three years trying to become someone else.

From the gray dirt of her grandmother's dead yard to the bright lights of Miami's art world, from a stairwell where boys threw rocks to a studio where she teaches other girls to make things from nothing, Diamond’s journey is one of survival, transformation, and the radical act of refusing the ending she was given.

Her grandmother told her she would never leave. The boys in the stairwell told her she was nothing. The teachers handed her brochures for community college and called it guidance. But Diamond learned a different lesson from a teacher named Daisy Glassgow, who wrote three tenets on a chalkboard:

What happened to you is not who you are.
Act as if.
Curate or be curated.

Those tenets became her Law of Delusion—the belief that she could write her own story, even when the world insisted on writing it for her. She made dresses from bedsheets. She embroidered names that were meant to hurt her into silk. She turned a rock thrown at her shoulder into a jewel she kept under her mattress for thirteen years. She became a designer, a teacher, a woman who builds things from nothing.

But becoming someone new means leaving someone behind. And Diamond must decide: How much of her past is she willing to carry? How much of herself is she willing to show? And when the world finally offers her the visibility she always wanted, will she have the courage to be seen—not for the woman she pretended to be, but for the one she really is?

Delulu is a novel about the stories we inherit and the stories we create. It is for the girls who were told they would be nothing. For the ones who believed it—and then stopped. For anyone who has ever stood in dead dirt and planted a seed anyway.