This Wasn't The Plan: On Pressure, Disappearance, and Not Going Back (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798285332299)

What happens when you stop being nice - and start being honest?

Maggie Ford thought she was just leaving a job.
Instead, she walked away from a version of herself: agreeable, bendable, useful - and quietly breaking.

This Wasn't the Plan is a fierce, unsentimental portrait of what happens when women refuse to disappear. In tightly drawn entries, sharp, spare, and darkly funny. Maggie unpacks workplace burnout, quiet rage, unexpected friendship, and the slow reclamation of a self she barely recognised.

She doesn't crash.
She doesn't triumph.
She just leaves - and keeps going.

For readers of Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, and anyone who's ever smiled through gritted teeth, this is not a story of success. It's a story of what comes after.