Alisa Bowman is a journalist who covers health, relationships, psychology, parenting and other topics for a variety of national publications and websites. She is also one of the country’s most sought-after book collaborators, with 7 of her ghosted and co-authored works making the NY Times bestseller list. A former senior editor at Runner’s World magazine, she has been a guest on national television and radio programs and featured in USA Today, Redbook, and First magazines, among many others. View her media kit here. Get more background on Alisa here. Contact: Alisa AT alisabowman DOT com.
You can learn more about her book projects and magazine work at AlisaBowman.com. Some of her works include:
PROJECT: HAPPILY EVER AFTER
Saving Your Marriage When the Fairytale Falters
In Project: Happily Ever After Alisa Bowman bravely tells the story of how she went from wishing her husband dead to renewing her wedding vows. Her four-month project was a last ditch effort to save a marriage that many—her friends, her colleagues and even her own mother—had written off as hopeless. It’s a fearlessly honest account of all of the topics that unhappily married people and the counselors who try to help them are too scared and guilt-ridden to discuss. Equal parts funny, poignant, and helpful, the book offers other divorce daydreamers courage and hope—as well as a 10-step plan they can follow to start their own marriage projects at home.
In the first marital improvement book written from the perspective of a recovering divorce daydreamer, it tells an inspiring story coupled with straightforward, prescriptive guidance. Readers will laugh, cry, and, for once, feel oh so normal. And then they will save their marriages, too.
Buy a copy from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books a Million, Buy.com, Indie Bound, or Powell’s
Get a Sneak Peak into the book’s introduction
Get a sneak peak into chapter 1
Discuss Project: Happily Ever After at book club
BE FEARLESS
Change Your Life in 28 Days
Available May 2012
Co-written with psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert, BE FEARLESS is a 5 step plan that is guaranteed to transform the fearful into fearless. It’s based on a revolutionary formula developed by Alpert, and it’s worked on countless patients whose amazing stories are told throughout the book. In as few as 3 weeks readers will transform their lives using the 5 step program. You can overcome negativity, perfectionism, procrastination, panic, worry, rejection, failure, excuses and even the people in your life who keep telling you that you can’t. You can turn your dreams into reality. You can find happiness, success and love, and you don’t need years of therapy or anxiety-numbing medications to do it.
BE FEARLESS shows you that the difference between the unfulfilled and the fulfilled isn’t the presence or the absence of fear, it’s what you do with it. The unfulfilled feel fear and give up. The fulfilled feel it and use it to their advantage.
BE FEARLESS helps you face that fear and use it to drive you toward success.
By following the BE FEARLESS program, you will:
- Find the courage to be who you really are, rather than the person you think others want you to be.
- Take strategic action at home, in career and in relationships so you can reach your true potential.
- Achieve what you once thought impossible.
DANGEROUS INSTINCTS
How Gut Feelings Betray Us
Chances are you’ll never be kidnapped at gunpoint, your child won’t be the victim of a predator, and your financial advisor won’t be Bernie Madoff. But every day, you make choices that could turn dangerous in an instant, from trusting a date with a drink to letting your son ride home with his soccer coach. Written with former FBI profiler Mary Ellen O’Toole, PhD, Dangerous Instincts teaches you that what we rely on to assess danger—fear and emotion—simply doesn’t keep us safe. What does? A smart, proven analysis. Using anecdotes from her thirty-year career, O’Toole explains the SMART method that she developed based on her experiences at the FBI. From recognizing the risk of a situation to observing people for clues on their intent, Dangerous Instincts shows how to make the safest decisions possible for yourself and your family.
{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
this book is mad good am writing a story about happily ever after
I have you book on my NOOK! I loved it and quoted many lines to my husband. However my husband has recently voiced this……My wife suck. Should have married a rich one like you! This was sent to his friend after telling him we could not afford to go to the beach with them! ugh,
Frustrated and married to a 36 year old adolescent
Bethlehem PA!
Heather–I’m so sorry to hear about your husband’s comment. That sounds so hurtful.
I am so computer dumb How do I order your book? Cost and where to send it. I read your blog everyday it comes and love it. I tried to get this book I while back but it was hopeless. So please make it simple for me. Computers make me insecure!!!! LOL
Linda Bruhn
612-987-1917
Hi Linda–
It’s available are regular bookstores. If they don’t have Project: Happily Ever After in stock, they can order it for you. You can also get it online here http://www.amazon.com/Project-Happily-Marriage-Fairytale-Falters/dp/0762439017/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1309282871&sr=8-1 and here http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/project-alisa-bowman/1100754785?ean=9780762439010&itm=1&usri=alisa%2bbowman
Alisa, I am very glad that you included this papragraph in your first chapter:
“Although our marriage felt dead, we didn’t suffer from anything that
would rule out resurrecting it from the grave. Neither of us was addicted
to anything other than caffeine.We weren’t co-dependent. He wasn’t emotionally
or physically abusive, and neither was I. Neither of us was an overspender
or gambler.We were both intelligent, reasonable people. Perhaps
most important, we both wanted to save our marriage.”
These are very important words. This message should be a wake up call to those of us who do live with addiction and abuse (which so often go hand in hand) that we have other important work to do first, before we can “save” our relationships. We must start with ourselves, to heal ourselves, to repair our relationships with ourselves, before we can have any hope of healing a marriage. This doesn’t mean we should just give up and divorce, but that there are serious problems in the relationship that will surely impede any efforts to repair the marriage IF they are ignored.
Lastly, and so sadly, we must learn to accept the reality that if a partner doesn’t wish to come along for the journey, there is no journey for the pair of you.
These are both such difficult things to accept. I wish peace and healing all those dealing with addiction and abuse, and whose partners have no interest in doing the good work to have a successful and satisfying relationship.
I would like to tell you ladies that i am a husband that has been separated for 2 years.. I have been a horrible husband never cheated but has had anger issues… i just realized 6 months ago that i had a problem and have started to work on it. I am now on my way to win my wife back and am going to buy this book today…
Hi dc,me and my wife have been together for 15 years married for 7.we have 2 kds together ages 8 and 6.i too have had bad anger issues and have been a horrible husband for all these years.we have been separated for 7 months she wants a divorce and we are waiting for the date too go to court.i too have realised that i had a problem and took the steps necessary too try and save my marriage.i have been diagnosed with being bipolar.she says she loves me alot my not in love with me.what advice can u give me.i love her and will do anything to prevent this.thanks,joel
Alisa, I am intrigued by your book. My husband and I married 1 year ago after having dated for 5 years. It is a second marriage for both of us. We have a great relationship and a wonderful marriage, but I secretly have trust issues stemming from some rocky times earlier in our relationship. Will your book help me? Or is it just for women who hate their husbands?
Hi Jen– The book is more of a story–like a novel, but with advice. It tells the story of my own marriage and what went wrong–and how I fixed it. So it’s not just for women who hate their husbands. I’ve heard from husbands who have read the book and have told me that it has helped them. I can’t promise you that it will help you, but I’ve gotten good feedback from about 80 percent of people who have read it, people in all sorts of marriage situations ranging from basically happy all the way to one step away from killing each other.
Hey Alisa
this is really something i am missing this will surely help to save marriages and surely to get happiness in their life. Before i have read one magazine How To Be Happy that tell us the secret to get happy and now this book really help to get happy with family.
Really appreciate you for writing this book.
We have been married over 30 years. we were very much in love. Now, my wife will not talk to me or even let me touch her. She wants to separate.She says that I don’t make her happy. She says that she loves me but is not ‘In Love’ with me.
We have had some rough years with our relationship, my unemployment etc. The work is back and the children are gone. I am devastated.
I have not been happy in life. I want to turn this around, be happy and make her happy.
I truly want to save my marriage.
This comment is for Bill. I am having the same issure. My husband and I have been married to 22 years and in November he said he no longer loved me, I made him feel bad about himself and wanted to leave. He stayed for a while and then left for 2 weeks, came back and after 2 weeks left again. Hes now been gone going on 6 weeks. He wont speak to me about our relationship only the kids, who by the way wont have anything to do with him, because he doesnt want to try to save a 22 year marriage. I also despritely wish to save my marriage. If you or anyone have any advice on how to do that or if you think this book would work for me please let me know.
Alisa, I found myself looking on google.com because I felt as if I were having an early midlife crisis when I stumbled upon your website. My husband and I have been married for three years and for both of us it’s not the first attempt in marriage. We met 10 years before and dated but I had children and that scared him because we were young and he was not ready to become a family man, I loved him though I had to make on, we both later marred other people he had two kids and then his wife left him, my marriage lasted only a few short months because I married the man out of lust and discarded any rational thinking abilities I had. My husband and I med again just by chance at a doctors appointment and we have been together every day since. I thought that I was depressed but I am really not. So when I found myself looking in the mirror yesterday crying I asked myself why was I unhappy and decided to look up early midlife crisis. I found a lot on the subject but nothing seemed to match me and how I am feeling, then I landed on your site and read a few things and ended up buying a copy of the book. I have finished it, I read it in under eight hours and with three kids and a husband I don’t really finish a lot of what I start because I’m always putting their needs before mine. First I want to say the book was great. It has given me a new look at my problem, after reading and with a lot of thinking and comparing I know why I feel this way, my husband has stopped being the man I fell in love with. Just as mentioned, the little things he did or said no longer happen and because of this and lack of us talking about it, I have begun to think that I am not a good person or a less than what my husband wants me to be. I’m not young anymore at 33 years old I know I’m not over the hill but things are changing and I don’t feel attractive as I did when we started dating. We have had many things that we have worked through but I guess we never completed the process and made sure that we were both getting the things we wanted from each other. I am going to tell him about your story, he won’t read the book, he is the type of man for example he purchased a book on how to overcome procrastination and read the first chapter only to put off reading the rest of the book, it’s still sitting next to the bed a year later. But I hope that he will have an open mind such as your husband and I wanted to thank you for sharing your life to help others, if I had not read your book I was on the brink of checking myself into a funny home to see if I was just going crazy. You gave me a lot of tools and insight that I didn’t have and unlike yesterday today I’m willing to look into the future and see that my husband and I can fix our issues and be as happy as we were the day we met. My husband is my soulmate, I told him from the first time we met and although it took us ten years later we came together when the timing was right and share a deep love that I never want to lose. Thank you for helping me see that again because my mood and sadness only made him upset and moody as well, now I understand what we need to do to live happily ever after. FIVE STARS….
hello Mrs Lisa iam very gratefully to have been seen your bok withi a tailtle projecto felizes para sempre for a magazine claudia so Iam divorced for aproximately for tres years but sometimes a feel bored with me so i need to buy uor book how a quem this my telephone number is 923302498-Iam woman angolan.
best regardas
Alisa,
All those things in chapter one are exactly what I feel and I’ve only been married 8 months! He spends all his time on the internet, never talks to me, never spends time with me, is always at a friends house, doesn’t want sex, he lives in his own world and i am the main breadwinner and do all the housework. I’m starting to wish I’d never married him. Will marriage counselling help or is it just the 1st year blues that every one tells me about?