As a teen growing up in an impoverished dysfunctional home environment, Laurine Schaffer realizes that she must be pragmatic and pursue a sustainable professional career path. At seventeen, she enrols in a traditional three-year Registered Nurse training program, where she quickly realizes that her perceptions of life and people are dramatically different from many of her classmates. Although Laurine ultimately forges a successful vocation as a college professor, at age fifty-seven she admits she is not being true to herself, or to her lifelong aspiration to write the story of her German Lutheran ancestors who fled Russia in 1892. Following an epiphany in an abandoned family cemetery on the original ancestral homestead in western Canada, Laurine begins to write. As one family history book follows another and another and yet another, her writing becomes a catalyst for a personal healing journey. The Reluctant Author is essentially a prequel to her three previous family memoirs and links the past to the present with poignant clarity.