Self-Righteous Bitch: A novel of one woman, one family, and the cost of being right.

Her son said it standing over her coffin, in front of the whole family: she even had to die a self-righteous bitch.
From her hospital bed in her final weeks, Ruth Callahan tells the story none of them know — the one that starts with a doll she wouldn’t give away at seven years old, and doesn’t end until the reading of her will.
A husband she carried without ever being thanked for it. A brother she finally, quietly, refused to save. A daughter who learned to be capable too young and never quite forgave her for it. A son who has spent his whole adult life waiting for an apology he isn’t sure she owes him.
Ruth was never trying to be right. She was trying to survive being the only person in the room willing to tell the truth — and the family that called her difficult, cold, and impossible built their whole understanding of her out of the moments she never bothered to explain.
Self-Righteous Bitch is a novel about the cost of being the person who holds a family together, and what it takes — decades, a death, and a will nobody expected — for that family to finally see what they were looking at the whole time.
She was not innocent. She was not cruel. She was exactly what the title says.
It is not the insult they think it is.