Ending your work life does not mean that you are losing you. Instead, it means that you need to redirect the energies that for so long occupied such a large part of your life. This transition is by no means easy; it can be painful and disorienting but also enormously exciting and liberating. Friends and family will help remind you that there is so much more to you than just “the lawyer”, “the teacher” or “the realtor.” They are the constant when you are surrounded by change. All the qualities that made you successful at your career are just waiting to be channeled into new arenas!

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I am new to my career as an author. In 2015 when I was 57- years old I began to write my memoir, The Apple and The Shady Tree, The Mafia, My Family and Me. Encouraged by friends and my therapist to share the story of how I successfully emerged from a dysfunctional family life, I hit the computer keys. My writing ultimately served to kill two big birds with one stone; I confronted the demons from my past that were causing me such debilitating emotional stress, and I quelled my nagging unhappiness that I was an underachiever who had sadly never reached my potential. With the publication of my book and its subsequent distinguished reviews, I now consider myself to be an AUTHOR!

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The Apple and The Shady Tree is my first book; at 62 years old I found my true “career” path! I have always known that I could write well… compositions and essays in school usually received high marks, speeches written for celebrations were applauded, and even letters and emails with less-than-upbeat messages have been acknowledged for their substance. Nonetheless, I ignored what might have been my true calling and spent my younger years in the non-profit world and then administering the family’s retail food businesses.

Okay, so maybe I had the writing skills, but that is only part of the equation in becoming a good author… you need a good story! In my case, I needed decades to gather my ingredients and allow them to cook. You see, I come from a family that could be the poster child for dysfunction: Mental illness? Check. Crippling co-dependency issues? Check? Poor choices? Check. Perhaps the “piece de resistance,” my Jewish father was the moneyman for the Genovese crime family. What material! An author’s dream!

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Lisa Novick Goldberg always knew that her family was “different.”

But it wasn’t until she received a subpoena to appear before a grand jury in December 1988 that she realized that her dad, Herbert “Big John” Novick, was the Genovese crime family’s money man. After her two-hour testimony, Goldberg, who admits to having struggles with mental illness, went into what she describes as a “catatonic state” for seven days.

“I stopped eating. I couldn’t sleep. I lost all sense of reality. My head just took on a life of its own in terms of, ‘Is something going to happen to my father? What’s going to happen here? Is this going to go on forever?'” Goldberg, now 62, tells PEOPLE in an exclusive interview about her book, The Apple and the Shady Tree: The Mafia, My Family, and Me. “Until I couldn’t take it anymore. My parents got me a psychiatrist. Prozac had just been introduced and it worked on me.”

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Goldberg is a steady chronicler of her family history and the years of her childhood and adolescence. As one would expect from a mob-focused memoir, the names of fringe characters are delightful, and might be hard to believe if not for the American familiarity, through film and television, with Mafia nomenclature. In these pages, readers meet Dom, Funzi, Tony Lunch, Johnny Sausage, and Benny Eggs. Though the author’s memoir delivers on its promise to present a realistic look at her father’s ties to the Genovese crime family, the true success of the work is how well it encapsulates a time and place: New York of the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. Goldberg peppers the lively book, which includes family photographs, with mentions of bygone places: Schrafft’s; the Jade Cockatoo in Greenwich Village; the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens; Lundy’s Restaurant in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. She also powerfully evokes her suburban childhood, which, despite her father’s dealings, occasionally seems idyllic, as when she and some neighborhood kids played in the Valley Stream dump on Long Island: “We climbed on hills of dirt scattered with junk that included old bottles, rebar, shoes, and an occasional appliance.” Throughout the memoir, the author’s fondness for the past helps her soberly assess a sometimes chaotic, sometimes comical, and sometimes painful family life.

An honest, funny, and thorough reflection on a complicated family.

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Perhaps the most empowering lesson that I would like to impart to my readers is that most of us have to have the strength, the ability, and the resilience to change the parts of our life that consistently hold us back from reaching our best selves. I always say, “our past explains who we are, but our past doesn’t define us.”

Another empowering lesson is that we all have our special story to tell. I encourage my readers to capture their memories in writing… the good, the bad, the happy, the sad. Your life story is your gift to your children and in some cases, to the world. There is no need to be concerned with the quality of your writing, just open your heart and a journal to those feelings and stories and messages that are uniquely you. The result can be liberating!

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