Dough: Optimism, Failure, and My Pursuit of the American Dream

When I opened my bakery, I knew it would be hard. I expected the long shifts, the backbreaking labor, and the stress of building a customer base. I certainly never imagined that I would find myself, one surreal morning in early May, fielding a call about one of my employees going to federal prison. And that wasn’t even the strangest call I’d make as the owner of a small bakery. Business lesson learned: just when you think it can’t get any weirder, it does.

DOUGH is the memoir of my four years running a franchise bakery in which absolutely everything went profoundly and often hilariously wrong. Told through the conceit of 32 “lessons in small business ownership,” DOUGH details the challenges of keeping the store going despite crooked architects, an attempted wrongful termination lawsuit, kidnapping, larceny, and single parenthood - and the critical life lessons I learned along the way.