In this authorized biography set in twentieth-century Black America, Arlinda Willis, a sharecropper's granddaughter from Jim Crow Alabama, fights to earn a love she does not yet know she already has, while a healthcare system she trusts dismisses her.
Born in 1951, in Toxey, Alabama, Arlinda grows up in the shadow of Jim Crow racism, raised by grandparents on a small farm while her mother builds a new life in Cleveland, Ohio. When she finally travels north to reunite with her family, she believes love must be earned.
She earns love as a teenager, dancing on Upbeat, Cleveland's nationally syndicated music television show, performing alongside Stevie Wonder and James Brown, integrating the American airwaves while the Civil Rights Movement is reshaping the country on the streets below. She competes in the first Miss Black Cleveland pageant. She builds a distinguished career at one of San Francisco's most prestigious law firms. Each achievement quiets the voice that tells her she is not enough.
At the law firm in 1994, she meets Rob Cole, a white British immigrant, who spends the next eighteen years as her closest friend, caregiver, and biographer. Their honest, funny, and sometimes difficult friendship crosses generational and racial lines.
When esophageal cancer strips away her independence and her carefully constructed image of strength, Arlinda encounters a healthcare system that dismisses her pain, minimizes her symptoms, and tells her one story while recording another in her medical notes. The gap between what her doctors say and what they write is a pattern. That pattern has a name.
For Once in My Life is the authorized biography thirty years in the making, a portrait of what can be gained and what is lost to care for someone you love. It follows Arlinda Willis from the sharecropping communities of the Alabama Black Belt through the Great Migration, the stages of Cleveland's Black entertainment scene, the corridors of San Francisco's legal world, and into a final chapter defined by medical racism, unconditional love, and the hardest lesson of her extraordinary life: That she is enough as she is.
Published on August 27, 2026, on what would have been Arlinda's 75th birthday, and the 63rd anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech.
Some content in this book, which includes brief scenes of violence, allusion to child sexual assault, suicide ideation, and sexuality insensitivity, may activate the reader.
For readers of Isabel Wilkerson's The Warmth of Other Suns, Keisha N. Blain's Until I Am Free, and Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air.
