Vesca Pisces with a star-like shape above the central intersection. Drawing by Rianne Vestuto.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.

Welcome to the digital home of No Prayer More Powerful, Kari Woolf’s debut memoir.

Book cover of 'No Prayer More Powerful: A Mother's Memoir' by Kari Woolf, featuring an illustration of a woman in a black dress holding a branch with white blossoms against a sunset background.

Hers is a story of two December births: the first beautiful yet shattering, the second yielding premature twins who struggled to maintain their footing among the living. Stripped of her identity as a successful corporate lawyer and feeling for the first time alone as a foreigner in the homeland of her husband, Kari found herself ensnared by postnatal anxiety and depression.

Only in embracing the end of her previous life could Kari find communion with mothers across time, culture and the legacy of her own DNA. And only in releasing the masculine way of navigating her challenges could she harness the power of motherhood to heal both herself and her family.

Told through a mix of letters, vignettes and story-driven essays, No Prayer More Powerful is perfect for fans of memoir, myth, and evocative storytelling. This powerful account of motherhood as devastation, transformation, initiation and healing will deeply move you.

Outline drawing of a DNA double helix made of intertwined laurel branches and small hearts, set against a black background with small white dots resembling stars. Drawing by Rianne Vestuto.

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Line art illustration of a woman with long hair, holding a smaller figure with wings, set against a starry background. Drawing by Rianne Vestuto.

Quote graphic with the words, "There is no prayer more powerful than that of a mother for her child." in red script text.

But who prays for the mother?

Meet

Kari Woolf

Kari is a writer & mother.

With a M.St. in History from the University of Oxford, a JD from the University of Texas, and many unlettered lessons from various lands in between, Kari is grateful to have already lived many lifetimes. She is currently settled in Bath, Somerset, with her husband and children.

No Prayer More Powerful, Kari’s debut memoir, has been described as “a tender, honest and deeply reflective account of motherhood as initiation and intergenerational healing.”

She is currently working on a fantasy fiction trilogy and a nonfiction collection.

Visit Kari's Website

Text in red and black says, 'NO PRAYER MORE POWERFUL' on a black background.

Enjoy this complimentary excerpt from:

Line drawing of a weaving on loom. Drawing by Rianne Vestuto.

Origin Story & Collection Map

THE PROLOGUE

Words weave a magic potent and strong, and I’ve been busy at my loom.

Looking back through journals, I see prayers for peaceful nights messily scrawled in pre-bedtime pages, assessments of my motherhood body and detailed descriptions of the babies I bore and their particular predilec- tions. There are notes of study as I learned arts aimed at keeping them and myself well in mind, body, and spirit. There are chaotic incantations, beleaguered complaints, and of course a few hundred Instagram posts (since deleted), where I wavered between wit and vulnerable confession, seeking to shape a new identity in prose and picture that was consumed neither by motherhood nor career. Language has become incredibly important to me; I have tried to be as precise as I can.

The breadth of our English vocabulary allows for this—a precision that invites the idea of uniqueness. But in writing, I have been surprised to discover how many of these stories, so intimate and personal, become in the telling universal, impersonal, downright emblematic.

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Motherhood felt so isolating that I could not comprehend how much of what seemed painfully and uniquely mine was and is, in fact, the story of all who suffer and overcome. While I imagine that these stories will most deeply penetrate the psyche of other mothers, I hope that anyone who might read them will feel a resonance with their own struggles, and that the light I found can illuminate anyone’s path to victory.

Stories, letters, essays, and poems—these pockets of insight offered in prose and verse form the frame, if you will, for these windows into my experience. Of all the ways I found to recount these stories, the letter has felt the most potent. While I wanted to show the glory and destruction of motherhood with a certain degree of objective detachment, in the end I found that only the most personal of containers could hold the fullness of both what I’ve experienced and what I want to share. And so here at the beginning I write a letter to you, the reader. Thank you for picking up this collection; I hope it opens something in you the way that motherhood opened a world vast, terrible, and beautiful, all at once, in me. Below I offer a map of this new world—the landscape you are about to traverse.

This collection is many times over a hybrid; it blends language everyday and fantastical, allusion contemporary and ancient as the earth. What is memory, and what is myth? Birth stories become apocryphal almost immediately in the retelling; these stories are no exception. In these pages, alongside descriptions of tangible sensations and settings easily visualized, I speak of the etheric. I invite in once again the intangible forces that nevertheless felt so palpable to me in these early years of motherhood, connecting me not only to my own family (present and past), but also to the legions of families that come both before and after. Ancestors, spirits, and nebulous icons of the mysterious eternal—I court them all in these pages.

Yet this collection is highly personal as well, flipping over the tapestry of my life as a mother to reveal all its messy threads, crossing and jumping across the fabric they adorn. And what a mess we find there. I must caution that these pages act as a sort of time capsule, preserving a period of intense and painful introspection that is, at times, hard to permeate from the outside. My desperation and longing remain palpable in many of these passages, which is why I have included many of them as they are, including the retrospective dates and circumstances that have moved now that this work comes to publication. I wanted to retain the rawness of the anxiety I felt. In deciding not to dull the jagged blade of this impassioned mental state, I have allowed some of the confusion to remain—it is against this swirl of confusion, particularly evident in certain of the sections I introduce below, that the return of cogency appears as stark and welcome relief.

Book cover for 'No Prayer More Powerful' by Kari Woolf, featuring an illustration of a woman with reddish hair in a black dress, standing against a sunset or sunrise background with dark, intricate branches entwined around her.

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Praise for No Prayer More Powerful

“This memoir shares powerful stories about creation, birth, fear, anxiety, hope, and ultimately healing. Through the vivid use of metaphor, the author paints an unflinching self-portrait of motherhood and all its attendant joys and sorrows. A lawyer and expatriate mother of a son and twin daughters, Woolf tells stories that will resonate with anyone who has wrestled with the competing demands of professional and family life, been caught between two cultures while settling abroad, mothered multiples, constructed a new identity after passing through the transformative experience of becoming a mother, healed from the anxiety and depression that can haunt mothers of sick children, or sought to find words to capture the ineffable power of bringing new life into the world.”

Kyle, US
"Kari is one of the greatest minds of our time. We are lucky for her to share her story with us."

Denise, US
"This is a work of rare honesty -- no varnish, but also not exploitative of sorrow and struggle. Anyone who has lived through a dark night of the soul, who has felt alone, isolated, misunderstood, overwhelmed or incapable of carrying on will recognise themselves in this story, and hopefully will feel as uplifted as I did when coming to the story's end. There are so many sweet moments that even the really challenging passages do not sit too heavy. While I believe this is a story for anyone, it will particularly sing to any parent, and especially mamas of multiples. I applaud the author's ability to convey the murky depths of postnatal anxiety and depression without sinking into cliché. She really makes these mental states palpable, and this can give anyone who fears they will never be understood hope. It can also remind parents in the depths of it that it is all worthwhile; the sweet glimpses into the author's family life were really uplifting. I cannot recommend this book enough!

Anonymous, UK
"From its opening pages, this memoir ushers the reader into an intimate, unvarnished, and ultimately luminous portrait of what it means to cross the threshold into motherhood. The author writes with a steadiness that feels both hard-won and generous, braiding reflective insight with tactile, day-by-day detail, rooted both in the time and place of its writing, but also pervaded by a timeless and universal quality. Highly commended not just for mothers and mothers to be, but also for fathers and fathers to be – for the latter an insight into just some of transformative power of motherhood that is so often left unexpressed by mothers themselves."

Anonymous, UK
"Personal. Riveting. Provacative. In this powerhouse debut, Kari Woolf turns her lively, arresting prose to exploring deep questions of motherhood, identity, and intergenerational healing. Her unflinching look at the changes wrought by motherhood offer mothers, daughters, and women everywhere a platform for reflection, compassion and healing. A must-read for every woman who has ever felt lost in a role that wasn’t big enough to hold her. I was hooked from page one. I couldn't put it down!

Katherine Hall, founder Books of Eden Publishing