A living second chance.
What happens when losing everything becomes the path to finding what you were meant to discover all along?
About Margaret Fleming
At eighty-eight, Margaret Fleming's narrative memoir Rise, A Book of Second Chances, is her first publication. But age has never stopped this indefatigable woman who is still a practicing psychotherapist and adopted the youngest of her ten children, a six-day-old infant, as a single mother in her late sixties. Rise describes her disastrous and failed childhood, her attempts to "be normal" as a suburban housewife and mother, her descent into alcoholism and an almost fatal suicide attempt. Given a miraculous second chance, she went on to earn an advanced degree in social work, establish a successful psychotherapy practice and found an adoption agency dedicated to the placement of hard-to-place children including those afflicted with HIV, cerebral palsy and a number of other physical and mental challenges.
Fleming is the recipient of numerous awards including a Hero Award from the American Red Cross; the Purpose Prize, Encore Careers; 100 Most Influential Women in Chicago, Crain's Chicago Business Magazine; Distinguished Family Service Award, Illinois Association of Marriage and Family Counselors and Oak Park Villager of the Year, Wednesday Journal. She is featured in Who's Who as the recipient of an Albert and Nelson Achievement Lifetime Achievement Award. Fleming has presented papers to a variety of organizations including The American Association of Adoption Attorneys and the Joint Council on International Children's Services. She and her family have been featured in The Chicago Tribune, Newsweek and People magazine and The Christian Science Monitor. Fleming lives in a Chicago suburb, with her children, three dogs and three cats.
What People Are Saying About Rise
“89 years of transforming heartbreaking tragedies into human kindness.”
— Perry M., Author & Scientist
"My sister Margaret is a brave woman who writes courageously of her suicide attempts, her failed marriage, her struggles with the horrid memories of incest and the solitude she sometimes feels within her own large acquired family. Her honesty in dealing with all this, together with her kindness and optimism, are aspects of her achievements described in her inspiring memoir, Rise."
— Edmund White, PEN/Faulkner Award winner & author of A Boy's Own Story
“Rise is an honest if sometimes harrowing account of the emotional and physical abuses that Margaret Fleming suffered as a girl growing up in a privileged American family. Determined to create herself anew, Fleming recounts how she did just that. No small part of the pleasure in reading Rise comes from watching the author create her own multi-national, multi-racial second family through adoption. But Fleming’s book is really about how people change and how in doing so they can create better worlds for others. The American family is in a better place because of Fleming and people like her. Rise is the story of how and why it is.”
— Nick Radel, author of Understanding Edmund White
“Margaret Fleming never had any good reason to "Rise" but she did. She found herself in one extremely difficult situation following another and she'd find a way through each and every time. Making gallons of lemonade from one lemon…A tremendous journey with a remarkable woman. Margaret tells her story as if we are sitting together, beckoning me into her confidence as she shares her truth, wisdom and eternal optimism.”
— Dr. Linda Howe, international Teacher & Author
Rise A Book of Second Chances
From psychotherapist and adoption pioneer Margaret Fleming comes a searing and luminous memoir that redefines what it means to reclaim a life—a testament to the transformative power of second chances that reads like a masterclass in resilience, reinvention and radical hope.
“In every end,” writes Margaret Fleming, “there is a beginning"—and Rise proves this truth across every hard-won page. This is not another memoir of a wretched childhood followed by a life of triumph. Instead, Fleming offers something far more complex and honest: a portrait of a life lived in the tension between darkness and light, where golden childhood Michigan summers and a housekeeper’s fierce love existed alongside unspeakable trauma, where joy and pain were not sequential but simultaneous.
Fleming’s journey takes us from the wreckage of her early life—pregnant at thirteen by her predator father—through the desperate years when she, as a young married mother of three, tried to “be normal” only to watch that carefully constructed life collapse into alcoholism and suicidal depression. What follows her harrowing near-death experience is not a simple recovery story but a radical rebuilding: from addiction to lasting sobriety, stay-at-home mom to dedicated therapist, heterosexual wife to a woman loving women. Each transformation required Fleming to recognize the second chances appearing before her—and possess the courage to seize them.
But Fleming's story extends far beyond personal redemption. In 1992, she founded Adoption-Link, a groundbreaking agency dedicated to finding permanent homes for every child, regardless of race, age, and physical or mental challenges. Over the years, Adoption-Link facilitated more than one thousand adoptions, forever changing the trajectories of children and families who had been told adoption “was impossible,” including the first international children with HIV to be adopted in the US. And in an act of profound faith, Fleming herself—a single mother of three in middle age—adopted eight children, building a large and diverse family that became living proof of her philosophy.
Written with unsparing honesty about the messy, non-linear work of recovery, Rise refuses to offer easy answers or false comfort. Instead, Fleming gifts us something far more valuable: a clear-eyed map through devastation toward possibility, a reminder that hope—“that most precious of all commodities”—can be recovered even after it seems irretrievably lost. In these times of upheaval and uncertainty, when so many are searching for a way forward from their own wreckage, Fleming's story arrives as both a witness and guide.
Rise is essential reading for anyone who has ever needed to begin again—which is to say, for all of us.
Press
Adoption Link, the agency Margaret founded, placed Zach Anglin with his loving parents, Harold and Patty. Watch this inspiring story and see the heights he’s risen to!
Margaret discusses her brother Edmund White in an upcoming documentary about the celebrated author's life.