Love, Me

At eleven years old, Shannon Hogan-Cohen began writing letters to her father, who would never read them. What started as a young girl’s desperate attempt to hold onto the man she adored evolved into a lifelong conversation across time, loss, and healing.

In Love, Me, Shannon shares decades of raw, unfiltered diary entries chronicling her grief, anger, and aching loneliness as she navigates childhood, adolescence, and adulthood without her father. Through heartbreak, triumphs, and moments of reckoning, these letters capture a daughter’s struggle to make sense of a world that has been forever altered.

As the years unfold, the father she idolized in childhood gives way to a more complicated truth: a man who was human, flawed, and no longer confined to the pedestal of memory. With maturity comes an unexpected shift-resentment towards her mother softens as Shannon begins to understand the hidden burdens that adults carry.

Woven alongside these intimate reflections are insights from the author’s therapist, providing readers with a compassionate framework for exploring their own grief and healing. Love, Me is more than a memoir-it’s an invitation to anyone longing to find peace with the past and a reminder that even in absence, love endures.

Author Biography

Shannon Hogan Cohen writes to make sense of the world. From a young age, she filled notebooks with reflections, always searching for meaning, connection, and the hidden threads beneath life’s surface, an instinct shaped by her childhood love of Nancy Drew mysteries. Whether it’s finding patterns in chaos or truth in tangled relationships, storytelling has always been her compass. A freelance writer with work published across community advocacy platforms, travel magazines, and personal essay outlets, Shannon gives voice to the often unspoken. She writes with heart, humor, and an unapologetic splash of truth-telling. When she’s not wandering the world and championing legacies, you’ll find her in her beloved “babe cave,” savoring quiet moments of reading, writing, and sipping a cup of coffee or crisp white wine. She lives with her family in Del Mar, California. Tristen Vance Henderson, MS, LMFT, developed a passion for working with children, adolescents, couples and families in community-based settings, inpatient and outpatient treatment, multiple schools, athletic, and corporate programs. She is an expert in the areas of trauma, sports psychology, interpersonal relationships, neurobiology, family systems, and clinical areas of PTSD, ADHD, and Anxiety / Depression. Tristen is an Owner at Mission Oaks Counseling & Wellness Center, a center for healing that provides the tools for revitalization of the mind, body, and spirit. When she isn’t saving the world or working on her own self-healing, Tristen recharges by spending time at the beach, reading, hiking, catching up with friends & family, and cheering for the Dodgers. She values her most important roles in life as Mama to her beautiful, sporty kids and Boxer, Sugar; Auntie T to her nieces, nephews and family of choice, and of course, most importantly, wifey to Cam.