Real Magazine
Balanced Living Column
Terra Wellington

“I know in my heart that I’m doing exactly what I’m supposed to be doing at this time,” says Debbie Gisonni

To read the full article click here.

Independent Publisher
Finding Joy and Life Lessons in Loss
Jim Barnes

It is likely that the book's excellent design features help it get noticed. Hers is one of a number of print-on-demand titles being published these days with a trade-quality look and feel.

When the battle against a disease like Alzheimer's is over and the loved one dies, many people have trouble getting on with their lives. One such person had an experience that inspired a new book on the topic:

Debbie Gisonni thought she had it all. A loving husband, a lucrative career, a big house... Click for full story

The Dallas Morning News
Try to make job loss a passage, author says
Melissa Morrison

"Her timing, unfortunately, was great: Today's sputtering tech industries are catapulting others like her out of their careers – whether they want to leave or not. But losing a job, she says, can be a chance to reconfigure and enrich one's life."

Debbie Gisonni was 38 years old and at the top of her field in 1998. She had just launched a publication for the then-booming Silicon Valley-based Web industry. She was making great money and oversaw dozens of employees in a multimillion-dollar company.

Then she quit. Click for full story

Reprinted with permission of The Dallas Morning News

San Jose Magazine
Celebrating the Complexity of Womanhood
Heather Wax

"While death and humor have often been bedfellows, Gisonni's use of the comical, gleaned from growing up in a New York Italian family, adds candor to the work."

Debbie Gisonni's Vita's Will: Real Life Lessons about Life, Death & Moving On (Writers Club Press, 2000) lets you see all the passion, bravery and perseverance that, over 15 years, brought her book to fruition. The title is a daughter's tribute to the larger-than-life, gritty mother, who died at 60 after a 10-year battle with chronic disease and disability. Part memoir, part self-help, the book also chronicles the four-year period in which Gisonni's father, sister, favorite aunt and mother all died, and how Redwood City-based Gisonni later jumped off the Silicon Vally fast-track at the height of the Internet revolution to work on her story. Click for full story

ForeWord Magazine
"Vita's Will" Finds its Way with POD
Mardi Link, Editor-in-Chief, ForeWord Magazine, "ForeWord This Week"

"print-on-demand has received so much muddy press lately, the radical approach to this subject is to rake the muck until something shiny oozes up. That something shiny is Debbie Gisonni."

While looking for the "dark side" of convention has been a successful journalistic formula, print-on-demand has received so much muddy press lately, the radical approach to this subject is to rake the muck until something shiny oozes up. That something shiny is Debbie Gisonni. Click for full story

iUniverse.com
iUniverse.com Talks with Debbie Gisonni, Author of Vita's Will

We talk to Debbie Gisonni about turning life's negatives into positives, having a marketing plan, and the way to look at your book as you devise marketing strategies.

Q: You have managed to receive a large amount of publicity for Vita's Will in a relatively short time, including articles from the San Francisco Chronicle and Fortune Magazine's On-Line Edition. How were you able to get so many different media outlets interested in your book and how have you harnessed so much great publicity to your advantage?

Before writing Vita's Will, I spent 15 years magazine publishing for the high tech industry in the areas of sales, marketing and management. I had the experience of knowing how to launch products, position them and promote them. Click for full story

San Jose Mercury News
Silicon Valley star uses life's lessons to teach others
Nora Villagran

"The book is a fascinating look at Gisonni's transformation from a high-powered valley player to an empowered community contributor."

Silicon Valley's Debbie Gisonni -- author of ``Vita's Will: Real Life Lessons about Life, Death and Moving On'' -- was a rising executive, moving in the valley's high-tech fast lane.

Then she experienced a heart-changing transformation that changed her life forever, leading her to trade in a six-figure income and stock options for a path she considered richer in meaning.

On Wednesday, she will be at East West Books in Mountain View to talk about what she's learned since making that momentous decision. Click for full story

The Peninsula Independent
Laughter helps author persevere
Tiffany Maleshefski

"It's a self-help book that reads like a peice of fiction. All that is purely intentional"

Death followed Debbie Gisonni around like a grim shadow between 1990 and 1994.

During that time Gisonni lost her mother to a 10-year battle with a brain tumor, her father to bone cancer, a favorite aunt to breast cancer and her sister to suicide.

"Death has a funny way of putting perspective on life," said Gisonni.

Funny indeed.

Gisonni, who has lived in Redwood City for the last 15 years, has a sense of humor that is the cornerstone of how she kept her emotional stability in focus through a dark period that have driven many to depression. Click for full story

Palo Alto Daily News
"Another marvelous text to extend our insights."
Don DeNevi

San Mateo County Times
Redwood City woman's grief fuels book about life's lessons
T.S. Mills-Faraudo

"Throughout the book, Gisonni inserts humor into some of the most tragic of her experiences."

Redwood City resident Debbie Gisonni said she could have spent 10 years crying after four members of her family died in a matter of four years. Instead she used these traumatic experiences to write a book about real life lessons about life, death and moving on.

The title, "Vita's Will," is a tribute to her mother Vita who she describes as a "firecracker" with a feisty, energetic personality. Her mother, whose picture is on the front of the book, became permanently disabled from a brain tumor, but outlasted all her other family members.

A few years after finding out her mother had a brain tumor, her younger sister killed herself. Three months after that, her father was diagnosed with bone cancer. And then her favorite aunt got breast cancer. Click for full story

San Francisco Chronicle
Where There's a Will, There's a Way
Family memoir offers advice about tragedies
Bill Workman

"Besides the skillfully written, compelling narrative, what elevates "Vita's Will" above the ego-tripping triteness often found in self-published memoirs is Gisonni's remarkable candor about her own emotional torment..."

Within a period of four years, Debbie Gisonni of Redwood City lost her mother to a debilitating brain tumor, her father and a favorite aunt to cancer and her younger sister to suicide.

Such a devastating succession of family tragedies might have left another person wallowing in self-pity and despair.

But Gisonni, 39, a former high-tech publishing executive who has taken a new direction in her professional life as writer and business consultant, has written "Vita's Will: Real Life Lessons about Life, Death & Moving On." It's a thoughtful, inspiring book about coping with deaths in the family that is part memoir, part self-help manual, part spiritual journey. Click for full story

Fortune Magazine, Fortune Small Business On-Line Edition.
Leaving It All Behind
How personal tragedy propelled Silicon Valley publisher Debbie Gisonni to found a company that helps others cope with grief.
Jennifer Basye Sander

"How big is the market for Real Life Lessons? Unfortunately, it is limitless. Who among us has not experienced a loss or a setback for which we were unprepared? Who among us has not spent a sleepless night of staring at the ceiling, wondering how to go on after the rug has been yanked out from under our feet? Debbie Gisonni wants to help us get back to sleep and rise up the next morning to face another day."

A few weeks ago in this column I wrote about the death of my close colleague, collaborator, and friend, Laura Lewis. I know that her death will affect me both personally and professionally for many months and years to come. Will my business ever be the same? I don't know. And will I really want to be in the same business without her help? I don't have an answer for that either.

Silicon Valley publishing executive Debbie Gisonni faced this same situation several years ago. In four short years she watched as her family dissolved before her eyes — first her youngest sister, then her father, her aunt, and finally, her mother. Although she'd had a charmed professional life, describing her career advancement as "a perfectly organized slide show," after experiencing these wrenching losses she began to question whether her mantra of "work hard, make money" was the way she wanted to live her life. "So I decided to leave it all behind, stock options and all, to find meaning in my life where there was once just money." Click for full story

Palm Beach Post
Experiencing grief during the holidays?
Chris Hutchins, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

"I realized that I had learned a lot about death, but also about life," Gisonni explains. "I never realized that, while it was happening.

The holiday season is about living, and giving. It's not supposed to be about tears and loss.

But it is. For some. Debbie Gisonni knows all about that. From 1990 to 1994, the California resident dealt with the illnesses and deaths of four of her dearest family members. It was a maddening, saddening time.

Her sister committed suicide. Her father and aunt died of cancer. Her mother, Vita, held on the longest. She died in '94, years after a debilitating surgery to remove a brain tumor. Click for full story

The Orange County Register
How to cope with the holidays after a loved one has died
Mayrav Saar

"If you just open your eyes, you see that things could be a lot worse. It gives you a perspective that you don't normally have."

There is no Christmas tree in the Castillo home this year. No festive lights adorn the house. The kids' handmade ornaments are still in storage.

Sandy Castillo would just as soon ignore the holidays, but she is making a few concessions to the season: She and her husband, Al, and their son, Aaron, bought tinsel and candy canes, a small tree and some flowers to decorate her daughter, Julie Castillo's, grave.

The vibrant 20-year-old loved Christmas. She would spend weeks planning each gift for every one of her nine cousins, her parents, her friends, her aunts, her uncles, and - most importantly, the kid brother she babied. Click for full story