Meet Sherry Lynn

Sherry Lynn has lived enough life for more than one memoir.
Adopted at five days old and raised in Arizona by Bill and Velma Van Allen, Sherry grew up knowing she had been chosen and wanted. She knew the story of how she came into their family, and she carried that certainty with her from childhood.
By fifteen, she was married. By sixteen, she had married again.
Eventually, there would be eight marriages, a son, more beginnings and endings than she ever expected, and enough stories to make her wonder how one person managed to fit them all into a single lifetime.
But Sherry has never believed the husbands were the whole story.
They were part of it.
So were the friendships, the music, the losses, the mistakes, the laughter, the people she loved, the people she left, the people who left her, and all the versions of herself she became along the way.
Her life has rarely followed a straight line.
She left high school young and entered adulthood long before most people her age. Years later, she returned to college and graduated from Colorado Technical University with highest honors, earning her Associate of Science in Business Administration and continuing toward her bachelor’s degree.
For the girl who didn't finish high school the first time around, that accomplishment meant something.
Sherry has also spent a lifetime learning how to talk to people.
Sometimes professionally.
Sometimes across a bar.
Sometimes behind a radio microphone.
And sometimes simply because silence has never been one of her strongest skills.
For a time, she hosted a Thursday-night country radio show called Dancin’ and Romancin’, featuring the music of the 1980s and 1990s.
Behind the bar, her gift of gab and belief in taking care of people earned her loyal customers—and some very good tips.
She learned early that people remember how you make them feel.
She also learned another lesson she still laughs about today:
You either dazzle them with brilliance or baffle them with bullshit.

Sherry has occasionally been capable of both.
What she has never been especially good at is pretending.
People who know her already understand the rule:
Don't ask me a question if you don't want a brutally honest answer.

That same honesty found its way into her writing.
She doesn't go back and make her younger self smarter, more innocent, or easier to understand just because the woman telling the story now knows how it all turned out.
If she made a bad decision, she'll tell you.
If she was jealous, angry, stubborn, reckless, or completely in love, she'll tell you that too.
If somebody hurt her, she doesn't need to turn them into a monster.
And if somebody once meant the world to her, she isn't going to pretend they didn't simply because the relationship ended.

Her stories are based on memory—what she saw, felt, believed, and experienced at the time.

And memory has turned out to have a sense of humor.
A song can suddenly bring back an entire summer.
A name can return someone she hasn't thought about in forty years.
A photograph can unlock an evening she thought was gone forever.
And every so often another memory appears and leaves her thinking:
How in the hell did I forget that?

Which is why Sherry isn't entirely convinced the storytelling will end when the memoir series does.
There are already stories that didn't make it into the books.
Stories remembered too late.
Stories that may someday become The Lost Stories of Chosen.

And after years of talking to customers, employees, radio listeners, friends, strangers—and pretty much anybody else willing to listen—Sherry wouldn't be surprised if another microphone eventually finds its way in front of her.

A podcast?
A conversation on somebody else's stage?
She's open to seeing where the story goes.

Because writing these books has shown her something she probably should have known all along:
She doesn't just enjoy telling stories.
She enjoys connecting with the people listening to them.
For now, she is writing down the good, the bad, the funny, the painful, the questionable decisions, the great loves, and everything in between.

Not because she got it all right.
But because she lived it.
And after all this time, she has no intention of making it sound prettier than it was.