26 / matters magazine / school 2026
I
f you ask Michele Richman whether she 
thought she would ever write a book, her 
answer is, “Absolutely not. It’s not even 
something that I felt was possible.” 
That mindset started to shift during 
the pandemic when Richman turned to a 
coach to help her defeat what she calls im­
poster syndrome, that voice that says you’re not 
good enough. Richman is a former practicing at­
torney who was now working at Lawline, a busi­
ness that provides online continuing education for 
lawyers. She is also a mom of two boys, including 
a special needs child.      
Richman felt stuck. “I was like, ‘I want to quit 
my job. I’m overwhelmed. My kids are home…. I 
want more,’ ” she says. She knew her fear was in 
the way of moving forward in life.
Richman’s coach gave her some written prompts 
to respond to and recommended she begin jour­
naling. Those writing exercises led Richman on a 
journey that resulted in the unexpected: She pub­
lished a book in March called The Stories We Almost 
Don’t Tell: Finding the Courage to Tell Yours. 
In her first reflection, Richman recalls needing 
to get comfortable living in her house with bats 
in the attic after the New Jersey Division of Fish 
and Wildlife told her it was illegal to remove them 
before springtime. “It was almost like the second I 
wrote it – what had been a stressful experience – I 
saw the humor in it,” she says. “It liberated me of 
the stress and the anxiety I had.” Wanting to share 
her essay with others, she published it on medium.
com in November 2021.
That therapeutic experience fueled her desire to 
keep writing. “I gave myself a goal of one story a 
month,” she says. “I did that for two years straight. 
I just kept doing it until I hit 50 stories.” Along 
the way, friends and readers cheered her on. They 
found her stories relatable. 
Richman says her writing process often started 
when she reflected on a memory while she was out 
for a walk. She’d open her Notes app and write 
down her memory and what she was feeling. The 
next day, she says, “I would wake up, go on the 
deck early in the morning, get my coffee and look 
at what I wrote in the Notes app. I actually didn’t 
know what the lesson I learned was until I started 
writing it.” 
Her family of husband David, sons Max and 
Eli and her mom were often her first readers. She 
would ask them, “What are your thoughts on this 
experience and how it relates to who I am today?” 
Those dialogs helped her see the bigger picture. 
She says, “The power of writing for me, was [that] 
I’m redefining these experiences that I thought 
shaped me one way but actually shaped me an­
other.” 
From the beginning, Richman’s friend Deb 
Joselow from South Orange encouraged her, even 
suggesting that Richman publish her own col­
lection of essays. At the time, she had only six 
The Stories She 
Almost Didn’t Tell
Writing helps author move from fear to courage
BY ELLEN DONKER
Journal writing eventually led Michele Richman to 
write her first book.

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