In this episode of the My 3 Husbands Book Cast, Shelley reads Chapter 7, "The Gift and the Gut," and then sits down with her editor to talk about what she just read.

Her psychology teacher is kind at first, and curious about her mind. Then a ring and a letter appear in her locker. Shelley knows she should tell someone, and tells no one. One snowy Saturday, a drive alone with him through the woods turns off the road, and she comes home to a warm kitchen and tells her host mother only that the roads were icy.

Shelley and her editor talk about why she wrote him so likable, how grooming works on loneliness and a mature mind, and how a young girl can sense that something is wrong and still go along. Shelley explains why she believed that telling would have sent her home in disgrace while he carried on as before.

Tune in to hear why Shelley says this chapter is not only about her.

Content Warning:

This episode discusses grooming, the abuse of a student by a teacher, and other sensitive topics that some listeners may find distressing. Please take care while listening.

If you or someone you know is struggling:

Samaritans (UK & Ireland): Call 116 123

Pieta (Ireland): Call 1800 247 247

Chapters:

• (00:04) - Shelley Anne Crawford reads Chapter 7: The Gift and the Gut
• (00:38) - Her psychology teacher, and a host mother's warning
• (02:14) - A letter and a ring in her locker
• (03:14) - The walk to his office
• (06:36) - That night, and telling no one
• (06:59) - A snowy drive into the woods
• (10:04) - Kent asks why she wrote him so likable
• (12:04) - The host mother, and how a child reads a warning
• (14:36) - Grooming, and knowing it while it happens
• (17:17) - Why this chapter is not only about her
• (19:20) - The need to be perfect, and what telling would have cost

Connect with Shelley:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelleyannecrawford2026/

Substack: https://shelleyannecrawford.substack.com/

Website: www.jessglobal.org

My 3 Husbands: A True Story is the memoir behind Shelley Anne Crawford's Jess© and PACT© frameworks on resilience and trust. Visit her website or subscribe to Between the Pieces to follow her work.

In this episode of the My 3 Husbands Book Cast, Shelley reads Chapter 6, "America Unplugged," and then sits down with her editor to talk about what she just read.

At the departure gate her mother's eyes were red, and Jason held on as if he could keep her there by will alone. She kissed him goodbye with more guilt than grief. When she was finally allowed to phone him, she heard his mother in the background before she heard him, asking "Is that Carol?" It was not her name. Shelley did not call again.

Her editor calls it a small bridge of a chapter, one that maps distance. Shelley talks about the shy girl at the gate, detached among crying families, and a world before cell phones where a call home cost a fortune and came once every few months. Her point is simple: if you are ever going to be vulnerable, distance is what makes you so. Looking back, she believes Jason's mother knew exactly who was on the line.

Tune in to hear why, when Shelley writes that she had let him go, her editor suspects the reader is not quite convinced.

Chapters:
🧳 00:04 Shelley Anne Crawford leaves for America with more guilt than grief

🔕 01:23 Three months without contact, then another woman's name on the line

🎭 03:18 Doing everything right and still not being fully known

✈️ 04:17 The shy girl at the departure gate is still in her today

🌍 07:00 Before cell phones, distance is what made a 17-year-old vulnerable

🕰️ 10:12 Looking back, she believes Jason's mother knew who was calling

🪶 10:47 Letting him go, and why the reader is not convinced

Connect with Shelley:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelleyannecrawford2026/
Substack: https://shelleyannecrawford.substack.com/
Website: www.jessglobal.org

My 3 Husbands: A True Story is the memoir behind Shelley Anne Crawford's Jess© and PACT© frameworks on resilience and trust. Visit her website or subscribe to Between the Pieces to follow her work.

Shelley reads "Snake in the Grass," the chapter where Jason's charm comes with fancy dinners and late-night motorbike races. Then he brings her home late one night, and his mother, Miriam, appears completely naked and hugs him, barely acknowledging the girl standing behind him. Shelley's own mother says very little when she hears about it. But she is relieved her daughter is leaving soon for a year abroad.

Afterward, Shelley sits down with her editor to talk about what she just read. She explains the chapter's subtitle, Some people are true, others only wear the skin of it, and why learning to see that difference and choose the authentic person became one of the resilience builders in her books. He points out that the chapter holds more than one mother. Miriam is sweet on the surface and sinister underneath, while Shelley's own mother, not always the best character in the book, does the mothering beautifully here.

Tune in to hear Shelley read the chapter in her own voice, and her editor's take on how writing a book can turn a difficult past into something beautiful.

Content Warning:
This episode discusses suicide, self-harm, and other sensitive topics that some listeners may find distressing. Please take care while listening.

If you or someone you know is struggling:
Samaritans (UK & Ireland): Call 116 123
Pieta (Ireland): Call 1800 247 247

Chapters:
📖 00:04 Shelley Anne Crawford reads Snake in the Grass: a dazzling whirlwind with Jason

🐍 01:26 Meeting Miriam, the mother who looked at Shelley like a rival

🌍 02:50 A mother's quiet worry and a year abroad

🚩 03:30 The warning sign Shelley couldn't see at 17

🎬 06:21 A mother character readers rarely meet in books or films

🎭 08:39 Some people are true, others only wear the skin of it

👩‍👧  09:35 Three mothers in one chapter, including the one who wrote it
✨ 11:51 How writing a book can make a difficult past beautiful
 
Connect with Shelley:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/shelleyannecrawford2026
Substack: shelleyannecrawford.substack.com
Website: www.jessglobal.org

My 3 Husbands: A True Story is the memoir behind Shelley Anne Crawford's Jess© and PACT© frameworks on resilience and trust. Visit her website or subscribe to Between the Pieces to follow her work.

In this episode of My 3 Husbands Book Cast, Shelley reads Chapter 4, The Glitter Before the Crack, then sits down with her editor to talk about the girl on the page.

She was already dating Martin, her first love, when Jason walked into the store where she worked and told her to break up with him. One stood-up weekend and a long bus ride home settled it. Days later she climbed into Jason's VW Kombi, and when he called her baby, she shot back, "I'm not your baby." Within two weeks came the ultimatum: "It's him or me."

Shelley and her editor talk about how childhood trauma can damage a young woman's intuition, and why hearing that inner voice is not the same as believing it. Shelley traces her "I'm not your baby" fire to the part of her that has helped her thrive, and names the irony underneath it: "he actually did end up owning me."

Tune in to hear the first decision in a chain that runs through the rest of the book.

Content Warning:
This episode discusses suicide, self-harm, and other sensitive topics that some listeners may find distressing. Please take care while listening.

If you or someone you know is struggling:
Samaritans (UK & Ireland): Call 116 123
Pieta (Ireland): Call 1800 247 247

Chapters:
📖 00:04 Shelley Anne Crawford reads Chapter 4: Jason asks her out at 17

🚌 02:39 The bus ride home where she let go of her first love

🚐 05:15 A first date in Jason's VW Kombi: "I'm not your baby"

⚖️ 06:46 "It's him or me": the ultimatum and the choice she second-guessed

🧩 08:17 The first conscious decision and the domino effect it started

🧭 10:21 How childhood trauma mars intuition and what it takes to rebuild it

🔥 12:05 The warrior part of her that refuses to be owned

🌱 15:08 Mentoring her daughters and young women to own who they are

🎻 17:36 "I'm not playing second fiddle" and the first sign of Jason's control

Connect with Shelley:

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/shelleyannecrawford2026
Substack: shelleyannecrawford.substack.com
Website: www.jessglobal.org

Reach out to Shelley to continue the conversation about learning to hear and trust your intuition, the thread she carries through this memoir and her other books.

Shelley Anne Crawford grew up on a South African farm where the map ran out. In Chapter 3 of her memoir My 3 Husbands: A True Story, she goes back to the childhood that taught her to read a silence.

In this third episode of the My 3 Husbands Book Cast, Shelley reads Chapter 3, "The Edge of the Fireline," and then sits down with her editor to talk about what she just read.

The farm sat in the dry hills outside the Valley of a Thousand Hills. At six she was left in charge of her grandmother, who waved her off with a cigarette and a drink four evenings running, then told Shelley's mother that Shelley had not fed her. Her brother Peter was six years older and born on the same day, with the body of a man and the mind of a child. When the local boys threw stones at him, she threw them back.

Because the real world did not protect her, she built another one. By seven she had a riding school with no horses and no clients, a clearing for a paddock and lesson plans she kept in her head. When things came too close she became a librarian instead, lining her dolls up in neat rows and stamping imaginary books. She tells us she still uses both, in her head and out with her horses.

Her editor tells her this short chapter lays the canvas for the whole book. Tune in to hear why a childhood that reads as extraordinary now felt normal at the time, and why he calls the last line one of the best cliffhangers he has read.

Content Warning: 
This episode contains references to death, bodies, and hanging, which some listeners may find distressing. Please take care while listening.

If you or someone you know is struggling:
Samaritans (UK & Ireland): Call 116 123
Pieta (Ireland): Call 1800 247 247

Chapters:
📖 00:04 Shelley Anne Crawford introduces chapter three, and a note before listening

🔥 01:20 Learning at four to notice the stillness before danger

🪨 02:09 Peter, born on the same day, and the stones she threw back

🍽️ 03:07 Six years old, in charge of a grandmother who would not eat

🐎 04:45 A riding school with no horses and a library in her head

🖋️ 06:39 Roy Campbell's The Zulu Girl, and why all of it felt normal

💡 10:16 Where her resilience work actually started, and why she still uses it

🎨 14:19 A short chapter that lays the canvas for the whole book

🪝 15:59 The cliffhanger she did not know she was writing

Links

Connect with Shelley:
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/shelleyannecrawford2026
Substack: shelleyannecrawford.substack.com
Website: www.jessglobal.org

She opens by saying that what follows is not a record. The names are pseudonyms and the scene is her reconstruction, built from what she knew of him and what others pieced together. A wooden panel pulled off a bathroom wall, nothing behind it. His life savings gone, the money meant to get him from South Africa to his children in London. He collects his guns and drives to a coffee shop, where a fourteen-year-old girl steps between the barrel and her mother.

Her editor starts at the end, at the koppie above the sea where he was found. That spot, Shelley says, is the only part of the chapter she knows to be true. She has stood there. They talk about the line "the whole sky coming down," and what sits against it, the pistol he once taught her to strip and rebuild in the dark until she could do it without looking. Money was how he controlled her, and someone had just taken his.

Tune in to hear why Shelley put a child in that scene, and what her editor says about the power a fourteen-year-old had, whether she knew it or not.

Content Warning:
This episode discusses suicide, self-harm, and other sensitive topics that some listeners may find distressing. Please take care while listening.

If you or someone you know is struggling:
Samaritans (UK & Ireland): Call 116 123
Pieta (Ireland): Call 1800 247 247

Chatpers:
✍️ 00:04 Shelley Anne Crawford on why this chapter is imagination, not a record

🧱 01:16 The money gone from behind the wall, and what it was for

💔 05:33 The birthday call three weeks before, and the woman he had ruined

🪟 06:41 A barrel on the kitchen glass, and the fourteen-year-old who stepped in

⛰️ 09:12 The koppie above the sea, the only part she knows is true

☁️ 11:56 The whole sky coming down, and the intimacy of the next line

🪙 15:51 Money was the mechanism of control, and then somebody took his

🧒 19:29 Why a child was the only thing that could lower the gun

Connect with Shelley:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelleyannecrawford2026/
Substack: https://shelleyannecrawford.substack.com/
Website: www.jessglobal.org

In this first episode of the My 3 Husbands Audiobook Podcast, Shelley reads Chapter 1, "Tied Together," and then sits down with her editor to talk about what she just read.

The chapter finds her in the art room of her country house in Ireland, children painting around her, cookies cooling in the kitchen. She had built that life out of the wreckage of an earlier one, in a village far enough away that it felt like a place no pain could reach. The phone rings and she lets it go. She never answers on the first go. A minute later it rings again, and it is her daughter Jessica, calling from London.

Her editor reads the chapter back to her through its senses, the ringing, the silence, the sound of the ocean in her ears though she lives miles from the sea. Shelley talks about the tsunami dreams she has had for years, and about why the only word she could reach for was "gone." Then she says something harder. There were times she had wished he would go missing, or get hurt.

Tune in to hear why Shelley believes there is beauty even here, and why, as she puts it, it is not like someone dies and then everything goes black.

Content Warning:
This episode discusses suicide, self-harm, and other sensitive topics that some listeners may find distressing. Please take care while listening.

If you or someone you know is struggling:
Samaritans (UK & Ireland): Call 116 123
Pieta (Ireland): Call 1800 247 247

Chapters:
📖 00:04 Shelley Anne Crawford introduces the memoir and a note before listening

🖌️ 00:50 The art room in Ireland, and a life rebuilt out of wreckage

📞 01:52 The phone rings twice, and the only word left is gone

🐚 03:04 The ocean in her ears, and years of tsunami dreams

🤲 06:49 The smell of oil paint, and the forgiveness running through the book

🪞 11:19 Admitting she once wished he would go missing, or get hurt

🌅 13:00 Why everything does not go black when someone dies

Connect with Shelley:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shelleyannecrawford2026/
Substack: https://shelleyannecrawford.substack.com/
Website: www.jessglobal.org