The ADHD Awakening: A Woman’s Guide to Thriving After Diagnosis: Received a 4+ star review, making it an IndieReader Approved title.
The ADHD Awakening: A Woman’s Guide to Thriving After Diagnosis: Received a 4+ star review, making it an IndieReader Approved title.Following find an interview with author Sara Kelly:
1. What is the name of the book, and when was it published?
The book is The ADHD Awakening: A Woman’s Guide to Thriving After Diagnosis.
It was published in 2025.
2. What’s the book’s first line?
“I never set out to write a book about ADHD in women.”
3. What’s the book about? Give us the “pitch”.
This book is about what it actually feels like to be a late-diagnosed ADHD woman.
Not the checklist version. Not the productivity-hacks version.
It’s about:
- growing up misunderstood
- masking for decades
- being labelled “too much” and “not enough” at the same time
- holding it together on the outside while quietly falling apart
- and the grief, relief, anger, and clarity that come with finally understanding your brain
It blends lived experience, research, and coaching insight to help women stop fighting
themselves and start building lives that work with their nervous systems, not against them.
4. What inspired you to write the book? A particular person? An event?
Honestly? Accumulation.
Years of not understanding myself.
Watching the same patterns show up in client after client.
Seeing my children diagnosed and realising, oh… this has been in our family all along.
But the real tipping point was recognising how many women were walking around blaming themselves for neurological differences they were never taught to recognise.
This book exists because too many women were never told the truth about their brains, and I couldn’t unsee that anymore.
5. What’s the main reason someone should really read this book?
Because it gives language to experiences women have been carrying silently for decades.
If you’ve ever thought:
- “Why is this so much harder for me?”
- “Everyone else seems to manage.”
- “What is wrong with me?”
This book doesn’t just answer those questions.
It gently takes the blame off your shoulders.
6. When did you first decide to become an author?
I didn’t decide in a clean, linear way.
I realised I already was one when the writing wouldn’t leave me alone anymore.
This book started as meaning-making, not ambition.
7. Is this the first book you’ve written?
Yes.
And it’s deeply personal in a way that makes that fact very obvious.
8. What do you do for work when you’re not writing?
I’m an ADHD coach, working primarily with late-diagnosed women.
Which means I spend my days listening to stories that sound uncannily like my own, and
helping women untangle shame from neurology.
9. How much time do you generally spend on your writing?
It’s inconsistent, because ADHD.
There were stretches of deep hyperfocus where the words poured out, and long pauses where I
needed space to live, regulate, and integrate before I could keep going.
The book was written in waves, not routines.
10. What’s the best and the hardest part of being an indie?
Best: Creative control. Saying what actually needs to be said. Writing with integrity instead of market pressure.
Hardest: Visibility. Carrying the emotional weight of the work and the logistics. Doing everything while also managing an ADHD nervous system.
11. What’s a great piece of advice you can share with fellow indie authors?
Don’t rush past your own meaning-making.
Especially if you’re neurodivergent. The pauses aren’t failures. They’re part of the work.
And don’t edit the heart out of your writing in an attempt to sound “professional.”
12.Would you go traditional if a publisher came calling? If so, why?
I’d consider it only if it didn’t require softening the truth or sanding down the lived experience.
This book works because it’s honest. I wouldn’t trade that for anything.
13. Is there something in particular that motivates you (fame? fortune?)
Neither, honestly.
What motivates me is the emails I get that says,
“I thought it was just me.”
While ADHD coaching can offer deep support, it isn’t accessible to everyone. This book was born out of a desire to widen that circle of care. It’s meant to be a companion for ADHD women across all financial circumstances, offering validation, understanding, and practical guidance tailored to their unique brains.
14. Which writer, living or dead, do you most admire?
I love authors like David R. Hawkins and Nicole Vignola, but it was the Twilight series that reopened the door to reading for me after a long hiatus in my twenties and early thirties, a season when books had quietly fallen out of my life.
15. Which book do you wish you could have written?
The kind of book I needed at 35.
At 40.
At 45.
Which is exactly why I wrote this one.