Stories of madness, memory,
and the radical act of
living anyway.

A Southern daughter who survived her mother's schizophrenia by disappearing into movies discovers, decades later, that the films were always a mirror — and the woman looking back at her was herself.

Growing up in Columbiana, Alabama, with a mother committed to Bryce Mental Hospital, Lisa learned to read her own life through the films that gave her a language for what no one would name. Years later — after her own diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder — those same films became the map back to herself. A memoir told through the lens of a lifelong moviegoer, it is a story of inheritance, survival, and the unlikely grace of making it through.

Why now: Most memoirs of mental illness are written from one side of the glass — the caregiver's or the patient's. Lisa Sims Harrison has stood on both. She was nine years old when she watched her mother taken to Bryce; decades later, she received her own diagnosis. That double vision — daughter and patient, the one who feared the inheritance and the one who received it — is what no other book on the shelf can offer.

After watching her mother disappear into an Alabama state psychiatric hospital, a daughter spends thirty years building a flawless life to prove she escaped — until the same darkness surfaces in her own mind, and she must finally uncover the buried truth about what broke her mother before it breaks her, too.

Lila Simmons spent thirty years building a perfect life to prove she wasn't her mother. She almost made it. When the paranoia finally arrives — a colleague plotting, a voice in the dark street at 2 a.m., a pregnancy she imagines so completely she builds a secret nursery under the bed — Lila is forced back into the buried past, and into the truth about who her mother really was before the cycle she's run from her whole life closes around her for good.

A devastating, searingly human story about the mothers we misread, the silence that poisons every daughter who inherits it, and the extraordinary, terrifying grace it takes to discover that the woman you spent your life afraid of becoming was the most courageous person you ever knew.

A woman who has spent her whole life wishing quietly — in a binder hidden under the bed — finally has to decide whether she's brave enough to want out loud.

Born from the same thirty-year wish-list binder that anchors Lisa's memoir and her brand, The Wish List turns a lifetime of private wanting into a warm, witty feature about permission, second chances, and living while you're still living. Honored at home in Alabama, it is the screen embodiment of the philosophy behind The Wish List Way.