Editor’s Note: This story appeared in the Senior Living section of the May 11 issue of LNP.
Suzette Mullen describes her everyday world as a little triangle that takes her from the Lancaster Press Building condo she shares with her wife, Wendy, to their co-working space at the Candy Factory across the street, to Evolution Power Yoga. Harrisburg Pike, and back home.
“I’m as happy as a clam about it,” she says. “It’s a very nice life.”
But it’s certainly not the life Mullen, a book coach, would have envisioned writing for herself more than 30 years ago when she married and moved with her husband to Houston, Texas, to begin a career in corporate law.
Mullen likes to tell his writing clients that a good memory finds meaning in some life experience in a way that connects with readers.
Realizing his true sexual identity was the inspiration for Mullen’s recently completed memoir “Graveyard of Safe Choices,” but at its core, he says, it’s about becoming yourself, whatever that may be. Her message to readers is simple: it’s never too late to say yes to your life.
For Mullen, 61, that “yes” came in the mid-50s, but the story begins much earlier.
The daughter of public school teachers, Mullen grew up in New Rochelle, New York, graduating from Wellesley College and Harvard Law School. After moving to Houston, she worked for a general practice law firm that handled mergers, acquisitions, and stock transactions. She would later enjoy a second legal career, representing low-income families in the special education process. In between, she dedicated her time to volunteering and raising the couple’s two children.
After 25 years in Texas, Mullen and her husband returned to New York 10 years ago with an empty nest, ready to start writing their next chapter.
“It’s definitely a time when people take stock of what’s next,” she says. “That was absolutely the case for me. I thought it would be just professional, but it turned out to be personal as well.”
And he would soon discover that the two were inextricably intertwined.
Mullen considered returning to her law career, but after a period of discernment, she realized that was no longer her calling.
“When I really sat down and listened to myself and all the things that I loved to do, all things writing and editing,” she says, “I was like, duh. I had been doing all of this in many different capacities for years and he was very good at it. When something comes easy enough to you and you’re good at it, you don’t think too much about it.”
Making the jump to a new career was quite easy. She began freelance editing and helping students write their college and graduate school application essays. He also began to write a memoir, not the one he had just completed, but a different one that explored his career path.
As part of that process, Mullen wrote about what she describes as an intense friendship between women. After reading those pages, Mullen’s book coach commented that one scene sounded exactly like someone falling in love.
And then what had been there all along suddenly became clear.
“It’s possible to have many, many, many layers of denial,” says Mullen. “All of us have lived in a world where heterosexuality is the norm. This was a friendship that was very important to me, but I had struggled with it for 15 or 17 years. I didn’t have the language to articulate who this person was to me. I really feel like I wrote myself.”
The personal epiphany, however, was much more difficult to handle than the professional one.
“I had a very strong marriage. I had a very nice life,” she says. “I was married to a lovely man. She loved him. He he loves me. From the outside, everything looked really perfect.”
Mullen spent 18 months struggling to figure out how to deal with this life-changing revelation. She had never been a risk taker, she says. Should she keep playing it safe or should she free herself from a cage she made herself? Did she have the right to seek her own happiness at the expense of others? Her husband reminded her that there was no way forward that didn’t involve pain.
“In the end, I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t about to go to my grave not knowing who I really was,” she says. “It was the scariest moment of my life. … Leaving a marriage, leaving a life, even when it’s the right thing to do, is still a huge loss.”
While getting divorced in 2017, she visited the only person she knew in Lancaster. Five weeks later she decided to move here.
“I had never been here, never thought of coming here, and when I got here, it was like things started to line up,” says Mullen. “Sometimes I think we don’t know what we need or where our home is until we see it and we’re there.”
Being true to herself personally helped Mullen discover the professional life she had longed for as well. In 2019, she earned her Author Accelerator book coach certification, and now works with LGBTQ writers and allies to start and finish her memoirs and non-fiction books. She is a founding board member of the Lancaster LGBTQ+ Coalition.
He also found time to complete his own memoirs. Her primary audience is primarily middle-aged readers, she says, but not necessarily people questioning her sexuality or contemplating the sweeping changes she’s made in her own life. She could simply be someone who has put off her own dreams or is afraid to leave the safety of the unknown, she says.
“It’s not too late to say yes to whatever you feel authentically called to,” says Mullen. “Now that I’m on this side, although it was very difficult, I don’t regret it. And there are no regrets for the past life either. I’ve been very fortunate to have had several very meaningful and beautiful chapters in my life, and this is a new chapter and it’s exciting.”
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