AS SEEN ON LORRAINE AND FEATURED IN THE TIMES

'Stacey Heale ... has such a muscular take on grief, and her ideas around how we live with profound loss are truly original.' Clover Stroud

When Stacey Heale's husband, Greg, was diagnosed with incurable cancer on their daughter's first birthday, everything changed. She quickly realised how little is spoken about what the harder times in our lives really look like, leaving us lost to navigate the unknown alone.

Confronted with a new life she was not prepared for, Stacey began to untangle the brutal realities of life and death - and the fundamental differences between our expectations and reality.

Now is Not the Time for Flowers is Stacey's unflinchingly beautiful and raw memoir that addresses the big conversations that imminent death dictates, boldly taking the reader on a journey through the full spectrum of our lives and their complexities. Told through vignettes of her own life and the death of her husband, Stacey offers a movingly honest, insightful and humorous account of modern womanhood through the lenses of love, desire, motherhood, death, grief, identity, personal growth and the challenges and questions that our lives force upon us.

Now is Not the Time for Flowers is a powerful call to arms for us to discuss the messy and unexpected truths of our nuanced lives.

'To tell the explicit truths of lives is critical; to refrain from doing so keeps us lonely and isolated. Women are shamed for their emotional natures and their desire to talk so much, so we've shut down these avenues between us. ... To be honest is to show care, for ourselves and others. There is integrity in truth; it is freeing even when it's painful and hard. Sometimes it can land like a blow to the head, but its ripples are in no way as far-reaching as secrets.'