CRYCATION: Find My Beauty, Define My 50’s, Decolonize My Life
“If you haven’t cried, your eyes can’t be beautiful.” —Sophia Loren
About the Book
About the Book
TAKE A TRIP with the newly platinum blond Sho-Sho Smith, a fiery Asian-American widow who, after a lifetime of putting others first, bleaches her hair, becomes a sex coach, ditches the kids, and hits the road to find her true self, one tear-soaked mile at a time. Her solo trip down the gorgeous California Coast the summer she turns fifty is no ordinary vacation. Crying her way from beach to beach, smoking weed, and playing sad songs, she embarks on the mid-life side quests that women know so well: Find my beauty. Define my fifties. Decolonize my life.
Meeting up with a colorful cast of girlfriends to party with along the way, Sho-Sho grapples with haunting questions of love, death, and regret as a modern widow of color and mother on the brink of fifty. Why did she open up her wonderful 20-year marriage with a white man to polyamory? Could her body journey cancel menopause and bring sexy back? How would she heal her shattered nervous system, de-center men, and smash the patriarchy and “pink supremacy?” And, can she still boogey board?
In this love letter to California, each stretch of PCH becomes a rite of passage where she sheds past expectations, refuses to age gracefully, and rebels against the unspoken rules that restrained her spirit. Cheered on by quirky ancestors, teenage daughters, and girlboss friends, she forges a brand-new identity: a middle-age comeback defined by her own rules.
About the Author
Sho-Sho Smith came back to her love of writing during her widowhood in 2016. When she turned fifty in 2021, she witnessed her girlfriends—along with 33 million other Gen X women—aging just as gracelessly, cluelessly, and anxiously as her. Good aging advice was even harder to find for a BIPOC girl in a Barbie world. She saw that 17 million brown and black ladies needed more than just another glass of wine or bubble bath to survive age fifty. Midlife women of color like her who felt sidelined and invisible were hungry for a paradigm shift and a new narrative of aging that centered us.
Sho-Sho also became a professional sex and relationship coach and Internal Family Systems practitioner after her husband of twenty years died of cancer. No stranger to grief, she launched her private practice to help singles, couples, poly, queer, and creatives of the BIPOC community go from barely surviving to truly thriving.
She holds a B.A. from UCLA and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She founded the first women’s hackerspace, Mothership Hacker Moms, and, prior to that, was a Fortune 500 corporate dropout who wrote for major companies in finance, tech, and retail. Surrounded by chosen family and beloved partners, Sho-Sho writes and practices in Oakland, CA with her daughters and their adorable dog, Cupid.
Book Excerpts
Hit play and dive into Sho-Sho’s journey with these raw, unfiltered excerpts from CRYCATION. From beachside breakdowns to middle-age awakenings, these moments will make you laugh, cry, and maybe even book your own escape.
“We were just marriage theater after all…”
I was so naive back then. This reading describes my naive belief in my beloved husband Sean’s whiteness as a talisman of white magic against death. I was naive about our friends, too, and found out the hard way the stigma of widowhood.
“We could open our marriage, be polyamorous…”
I hit on polyamory as a creative solution to a marriage devastated from cancer.
“That’s my wife grade?”
My husband gives me my wife grade before he takes his last breath: N.B.
“Sexual racism goes like this…”
This astonishing discovery led me to become a sex and relationship coach for BIPOC.
“The two things worth having: white skin and a pink d!ck…”
How did I stare in a mirror for decades and not see that I wasn’t white? This was the moment I woke up.
Endorsements
“I was sobbing over my avocado toast and laughing hysterically over lavender lattes as I devoured this emotionally engaging literary experience at cafes throughout the Bay Area. Smith delivers a bold wake up call to reclaim our bodies, our stories and live our most authentic lives. I couldn’t put it down and wanted nothing more than to be with Smith every step of the way in this journey of middle aged self discovery post-widowhood. She smashes and examines every socially constructed box she can get her hands on from sex, pleasure, drugs, spirituality, body image, race, parenthood, widowhood, aging, fitness and beauty culture. Smith is honest, open and unapologetic in her experience of the world, shattering societal constructs along the way. I’m so here for it!”
– Madison Young, Filmmaker, Sexual Revolutionary, & Author of the memoir “Daddy“
“CRYCATION is a raw, radiant act of liberation. Sho-Sho Smith writes with unflinching honesty, ancestral wisdom, and erotic truth. This memoir is a love letter to becoming—fierce, funny, and deeply decolonial.”
– Dr. Jennifer Mullan, Author of the national bestselling book “Decolonizing Therapy: Oppression, Historical Trauma & Politicizing Your Practice”
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