These Broken Roads by Donna Marie Hayes

Donna Marie Hayes is a performing artist, an actress, and with her debut memoir–an acclaimed writer. THE BROKEN ROADS reads like a novel. Donna writing is vivid and captures the hearts of readers. 

After being scammed by a man who targeted her, Donna decided to share her story. It is a warning to all women—which is why this book is so important. But it is also a story of a woman who would not allow herself to become a victim. She never had. Although she had a difficult childhood, two difficult marriages, and other challenges along the way, Donna Marie Hayes survived. In fact, she thrived to become a businesswoman in the difficult financial world and then to become a performing artist. 

Her journey—the story of the roads taken—and the obstacles along the way, is inspirational. 

To launch her book, she created a show which was advertised on a billboard in New York City. An amazing achievement for anyone–especially for a writer. Her show at The Cutting Room included a wide range of songs that spans the catalogs of Bob Marley, to the Great American Songbook, to a bit of Nancy Sinatra for good measure.

Now that she has been acclaimed for her first book, I predict Donna Marie will be writing many more. And I look forward to her returning to Joy on Paper next year. She’s a hero because she never gave up and she has found the joy on paper and the joy of sharing her story with others. 

About the book:

One woman’s story, every woman’s nightmare

Donna Marie Hayes had a fortitude and smarts. She already survived so much. In this gripping memoir, Hayes recounts the story of her impoverished Jamaican childhood and eventual immigration to the United States at 14. She weathers hardships, including a strict church upbringing, family abandonment, and marriages fused with domestic violence. Then she breaks free as a single mother.

Decades later, Donna is educated and at the top of her game in New York City. Her career is soaring on Wall Street and she is starring in her own one-woman show off Broadway. Yet at the peak of her triumph, she is scammed and robbed of her life’s savings by the “love of her life” who she meets on an online dating site. The mastermind was not the usual faceless online fraudster, hiding behind a computer screen in a faraway land; rather, he slept beside her for a year and a half, pretending to be the love of her life.

This is the story of how that woman rose yet again to find her power, making the scam and her choice of such a man the last run along the broken roads of her past.