Perfectly Imperfect: A Life in Progress

You can tell a woman s whole life story from the possessions in her jewelry box. Like reading a palm, you can trace the points where her life has intersected with memorable events, people, places, and loves. You can speculate on the essence of her personality, all from what she has accumulated in that box.
from Perfectly Imperfect

In her acclaimed first book, In an Instant, Lee Woodruff, along with her husband, ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff, wrote eloquently and honestly about the struggles they faced together as Bob recovered from a traumatic brain injury sustained in Iraq. Now, with the same candor and clarity, Lee Woodruff chronicles her life as wife, mother, daughter, sister, and friend.

Woodruff s deeply personal and, at times, uproariously funny stories highlight such universal topics as family, marriage, friends, and how life never seems to go as planned. On raising teenagers: Now with a boy...

Publishers Weekly

Following her memoir of healing, coauthored with her husband, Bob Woodruff, an ABC journalist gravely wounded in a bomb attack in Iraq (In an Instant), Lee delivers a collection of 17 brief, plainspoken essays about being a busy mother to four kids and a loving wife, daughter and friend who doesn't always know the right answers. Navigating the adolescence of her two oldest kids, Mark and Cathryn, focuses much of her parenting effort, and where the whole clan was once comfortable with nonchalant nudity, once her son turned into Mr. Hyde and her daughter into an eye-rolling critic, "the bathroom door is sealed tighter than a government nuclear testing ground in New Mexico." In the essay "A Different Ability," Woodruff writes movingly of first learning about her younger daughter's deafness (Nora and her twin sister were born by surrogate) and how a personal tragedy has been transformed in time to a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. Similarly, Lee writes of the sustaining friendship with Melanie, whose own journalist husband died in Iraq, through the initial hours of grief when she learned of Bob's injuries. Lee moves fluently from deep to lighter subjects, such as worrying about her sagging knees or bemoaning her otherwise ideal husband's woeful gift-selecting ability. Self-deprecating and modest, Woodruff is certainly likable, and this collection will broaden her appeal. (Apr.)

Lee Woodruff is the life and family contributor for ABC’s Good Morning America and a freelance writer. She is on the board of trustees of the Bob Woodruff Family Foundation, a nonprofit organization that provides critical resources and support to our nation’s injured service members, veterans, and their families, especially those affected by the signature hidden injuries of war: traumatic brain injury and combat stress. Lee Woodruff lives in Westchester County, New York, with her husband, ABC News anchor Bob Woodruff, and their four children.