Charleston, SC, July 27, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Palmetto Publishing has released Pivoting From Blue: One Year of Death, Divorce and Discovery, the debut work of faction by Skip Van Gardner. The book delivers a deeply personal account of a man enduring the simultaneous collapse of nearly every pillar in his life, from marriage and career to the health of both parents, and the psychological unraveling that followed.
The story traces a single devastating year in Van Gardner's life, a period marked by the convergence of crises most people face only one at a time, if ever. A parent enters hospice. Another parent battles Alzheimer's. A marriage fractures. A career unravels. Across this landscape of loss, Van Gardner also confronts a harrowing Atlantic crossing that threatens his life in the most literal sense. The narrative moves between hospice hallways, open ocean, courtrooms of the mind, and the quiet, strange act of rebuilding through creative expression. It is a story told without polish or distance, written by someone still close enough to the wreckage to describe exactly how it felt.
At the center of the book is a phenomenon Van Gardner identifies as Psychological Death, a state of emptiness so total that identity itself dissolves. He did not simply lose the structures around him. He lost his understanding of who he was. The stakes of the story are not dramatic in the conventional sense. They are existential. The question the book poses is not whether he will overcome a single obstacle but whether he will survive the complete disintegration of the self he spent decades constructing. Faith, humor, and music surface as unlikely lifelines, though the book refuses to frame recovery as clean or triumphant.
Skip Van Gardner stated, "I did not write this book because I handled things well. I wrote it because I survived it anyway, and I think there are people out there treading water in the dark right now who need to know that surviving is enough. You do not have to be strong. You just have to be willing to keep going."
Pivoting From Blue enters a market shaped by readers' growing appetite for brutally honest, voice-driven narratives about grief and midlife reckoning. It sits alongside works such as Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and Simon Fitzmaurice's It's Not Yet Dark, books that refuse to romanticize suffering while honoring the stubborn act of endurance. The book speaks directly to adults who have weathered caregiving, loss, or the quiet crisis of watching a familiar life become unrecognizable. Van Gardner, a businessman who returned to writing after a long hiatus, brings a perspective grounded not in literary tradition but in lived experience.
Reviews are already glowing. One Amazon customer said, "Raw, honest, and utterly compelling. I could not put it down."
Pivoting From Blue is available for purchase online at Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com. For more information about the author, please visit any of their social media platforms.
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Author’s Site: skipvangardner.com
About the Author: Skip Van Gardner is a businessman turned author whose debut work, Pivoting From Blue, delivers a raw, deeply personal account of surviving a year that nearly destroyed him. With a voice that balances gut-wrenching honesty with disarming humor, he invites readers into an experience of trauma, psychological near-death, and ultimately, hard-won renewal.
After a long, deliberate hiatus from writing, one he describes as necessary to actually live life and learn from it, Skip returned to the page with a story he could no longer keep to himself. Pivoting From Blue captures the chaos, heartbreak, and absurdity of a year in which everything fell apart, and the grueling, sometimes laughable fight to put it all back together. His approach is refreshingly self-aware; he examines his own decisions with the same wry hindsight we reserve for looking back at Flock of Seagulls hair or the disco era, acknowledging that time softens everything if we let it.
Skip spent twenty years living in Manhattan, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, before settling outside of Orlando, Florida. A dedicated father and avid outdoorsman, he finds clarity in the mountains and along the ocean, where he fly fishes, writes, and listens to the stories of others, because he believes every person's story matters. Follow Skip Van Gardner for updates on new releases.
Media Contact: publicity@palmettopublishing.com
Available for interviews: Author, Skip Van Gardner
Leah Joseph Palmetto Publishing katarina@palmettopublishing.com
