The Waves Keep Coming

In 1986, ten-year-old Michael RoBards lived above the Pacific in Laguna Beach, where his family's beautiful life was coming apart. His older brother, Mark, was his guide through it all: a pianist, a computer obsessive, an infuriating prankster, and the person who made him feel safe. On Mark's sixteenth birthday, Michael walked down the hall carrying a present. Before the morning was over, he had lost his brother to suicide. He went to school anyway.

Decades later, Michael is a psychotherapist helping teenagers survive their worst nights and families live with losses they cannot explain. At home, he struggles to hear the people he loves with the same care he offers strangers. Becoming someone others can depend on will require him to confront the damage he has caused—and the family history he thought he understood.

Then come the home movies he could barely watch and the papers his parents left behind. In their handwriting, he encounters people he never fully knew.

Moving from coastal California to a crowded Kentucky household, The Waves Keep Coming is a candid, darkly funny memoir of brotherhood, parenthood, and the limits of understanding. It asks what happens when the story you have told yourself for forty years changes—and how you keep loving the people inside it.