“…I knew this was no foe to be feared. This was no evil sorcerer to be battled. I looked into the eyes of Cancer. What was there was pure Divine Love. What emanated was compassion for all I’d experienced and for the many ways I’d hurt the most important person in my life—ME.”
Mosaic Heart is not a book solely about cancer, but cancer is an integral part of this story. As her teacher and guide, cancer provided Donna Mazzitelli with the ability to see that the world and her family would go on, with or without her. Yet, if she wanted to continue to be a part of life and living, she had to learn to care for herself first. As her companion, cancer revealed that it was time to take in this lesson of self-care, self-love, and self-compassion.
Donna’s story reflects a deep dive into the exploration of pieces of her life—most especially her marriage, family life, and the discovery of her life’s purpose beyond midlife. Above all else, this is a love story, as Donna began to rebuild her heart.
Cancer showed up in Donna’s fifties. Initially, she saw cancer as an unexpected, imposing intruder—something to be feared and fought against. Something to be excised. Something to be eradicated. Ultimately, cancer turned out to be Donna’s closest friend and her most honest and life-affirming ally.
Author: Donna Mazzitelli
Publication Date: February 14, 2022
Available At:
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Donna Mazzitelli
Donna Mazzitelli believes that finding our voices is critical to living authentic lives. As founder of Writing With Donna and Merry Dissonance Press, Donna is an award-winning writing coach, editor, and publisher. She helps writers connect to their unique core voice so they can share messages crafted with heart. Donna’s life experiences, which include two cancer diagnoses and significant personal family loss, have helped grow her heart and compassion, as well as her intuition.
Donna recognizes that everyone has stories to tell. The more we share our stories from our hearts—whether fiction or nonfiction—the more our readers will connect with us and be transformed. This is how we heal ourselves and our world.
Donna continues to work on her own writing. To date, she has written and published three children’s books: Warm Toes, The Great Stirring, and The Recycling Project. Mosaic Heart: Pieces of an Unfinished Life is Donna’s first memoir. She has begun work on her next memoir, Madonna Blue Heart, which she intends to release in less than a decade!
After fifty years in the San Francisco Bay Area, Donna resides in Castle Rock, Colorado, with her husband, Dominic, and their loving lap dog, Leo.
What Our Readers Are Saying…
“Donna Mazzitelli integrally weaves the aspects of healing, reflection, and resolve into her life’s journey. We become witness to the honest array of emotions and challenges when dealing with illness. Beautifully written, Mosaic Heart opens a gateway for anyone to go deeper into their own truth and healing.”
—Janet L. Diederichs, Healing and Teaching Arts Practitioner
“Mosaic Heart helps us peer not only into Donna’s life, but into our own hearts and life journeys. The vignettes, or pieces, weave together into a heartwarming story of courageous resilience, harnessed intuition, and tremendous strength that helped me discover more about myself as the reader. Curl up and dive into this incredible memoir told by a truly remarkable, loving, caring woman.”
—Meghann Conter, Founder, TheDames.co global community for high-caliber women leaders in business
“Donna is an amazing storyteller, weaving her past with her present to understand and accept her journey with breast cancer and beyond. Every woman’s journey is a personal one, and Donna’s will be an inspiration to so many. Her message that you need to accept and learn from the experience to be able to thrive and grow from it is powerful!”
—Michelle Hoglan, Visionary at The Boob Report, The Boob Report podcast on Spotify, iTunes, Google Play, and TheBoobReport.com/podcast
“A courageous, tender, heartwarming memoir that shows us a diagnosis can be a new beginning of self-care and self-love. Donna Mazzitelli is a brilliant storyteller and gifts every reader inspiration and hope that what is broken can be rebuilt. Mosaic Heart illuminates a heroine’s journey. I couldn’t put this beautiful book down.”
—Devon Combs, Equine Gestalt Coach and Leader of Unbridled Retreats®, UnbridledRetreats.com
Readers’ Favorite Review
… a moving and optimistic memoir.
“Mosaic Heart: Pieces of an Unfinished Life by Donna Mazzitelli is a moving and optimistic memoir. It is beautifully written. The cover is magnificent and perfectly conveys the messages we find in this book of self-discovery. Donna gratefully but also generously shares with us her healing path, her deepest reflections, honestly, and is at the same time hopeful. Donna’s work is not like others; it is about the healing process and about finding your true self. It is about getting better through illness!
“Mosaic Heart is the story of Donna, of how she got cancer in her fifties and fought it as an enemy, which it was, of course. But, in the long term, this terrible illness led her to make changes and become who she was meant to be. This magnificent story will definitely help, inspire, and support people with cancer but also others, such as myself. Indeed, the story makes you think about your life, or rethink it in depth. It relates how, through being so ill, the author discovers – step by step – who she really is, what actually matters and what to do with the rest of her life. This is one of my favorite quotes from this amazing opus: “Healing requires a willingness to look at the pieces and know them, to understand their messages, and to take in how they can serve me and my life today.” This is a must-read for all! Thank you for sharing such a gem, Donna Mazzitelli!”
“Donna’s work is not like others; it is about the healing process and about finding your true self.”
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Foreword Clarion Review
Donna Mazzitelli’s memoir Mosaic Heart is about how facing cancer transformed her life.
“Written as a series of poignant vignettes, the text shares Mazzitelli’s intimate thoughts about facing cancer, her sense that her body had betrayed her, and her fear that she would never again feel whole, beautiful, or “perfect.” But the narrative, while explicit in expressing Mazzitelli’s dismay at the possibility that she would not live to see her children grow into adulthood and her rage over what she felt to be a loss of control over her life, also includes satisfying examples of growth.”
“Through its focus on her inner world, the text reveals how Mazzitelli’s inability to speak her innermost thoughts aloud left her feeling alone and voiceless. Examples of life events that made her hide her thoughts and feelings from others are given, contributing to the raw and troubling question of whether her inability to express her inner truth led to ill health. But the book also recouches illness as a wake-up call, and suggests that inner turmoil is a given when one is making profound personal changes.”
“Conveying hope, the memoir Mosaic Heart is about facing fear and discovering one’s true self.”