Our personal stories help us celebrate and appreciate our lives. If evaluated, they encourage us to put our lives in perspective and learn from our hardships, tragedies, triumphs, and soft moments. Even the terrible, heartbreaking experiences shape us into the people we are today. It is important to share our stories to inspire others to share theirs, so we are reminded that we are not alone in this thing called life.
Jean Peelen’s Feisty: A Memoir in Pieces celebrates life. It recaps in short stories and vignettes what made Jean the eighty-three-year-old woman she is today, and who doesn’t love people who step out of their comfort zones, examine their lives honestly, recover from tragedy, and reinvent themselves? In this book, you will find snapshots of Jean’s life and the lessons learned from those experiences, and how they prepared her for the future role of civil rights lawyer, mother, feminist, and activist. You will find poetry in some chapters as well as longer stories in others. The memoir is funny, sad, rich, raw, and full of wisdom.
Feisty is an easy, quick, and spunky read. It took me a little over an hour to read it all, and I could not put it down! I highly recommend this short but thought-provoking memoir to students of writing, human rights activists, or the curious reader who loves reading memoirs. This is a perfect book to read while sipping coffee or tea with a cozy blanket on a fall afternoon.
A bit about the author, Jean Peelen:
Jean is an active eighty-three-year-old writer, speaker, activist, and aspiring TikTok influencer. A graduate of the University of South Alabama and the University of Alabama School of Law,
Fiesty: A Memoir in Little Pieces is her first book. Before writing Fiesty, Jean went from wife and mother to civil rights attorney, federal broadcasting executive, model and actress, show host, dog rescuer, elected official, and more. Her life has been a series of reinventions. As written on her website, Jean lives by the following principles:
1. Women will save this nation [the United States], and older women need to take up new roles as leaders, teachers, and mentors.
2. Every person should shake up his/her/their life at least every twenty years. Reinvent yourself. Become someone new and different. Contribute in a new and different way.
3. It does no one any good to retire their bodies, spirits, or minds from creative activities. Retirement, when one goes from work to only leisure, is a distinctly American, unhealthy habit. I have retired three or four times, but never for real. Live your life fully for all of your years.
Jean lives in the mountains of North Carolina in a tiny house where she continues to write and fight for women’s reproductive rights.
To learn more about Jean Peelen or purchase Fiesty, visit Jean’s websites, www.jeanpeelen.com
and www.oldwomenwhowrite.com.
© Copyright Vilma G. Reynoso 2025
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