When Mary Beth and her family moved to the East Coast to live in a home she'd chosen, she assumed she had landed in heaven. Her husband took a teaching job at a small Christian college, while she took care of the three children in her castle—and found a shining star in Melo, her husband's female student.

A year later, Mary Beth found her life upended as her husband grew jealous of her relationship with Melo—which was soaring from friendship into love. After relocating to Minneapolis, she found her new feelings of freedom and love were still mixed with paralyzing self-doubt—and as Melo wandered further away, Mary Beth realized she needed to embrace her internal strength to find true peace and liberation.

Rooted in the struggles of coming out in the eighties and nineties, Imprint is a candid account of escaping brutality for self-love, and embodies the fight for self-identity, independence, and equality that women and members of the LGBTQ+ community still face today.

Mary Beth Spray is a writer, educator, and grandmother. Originally from the Dakotas, Mary Beth now lives with her husband of twenty-six years in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as a retired high school French teacher and gardener. As a teacher and single mother, she supported herself and three children, and wrote grants for students of low economic status to participate in trips abroad. A graduate of the University of Minnesota with a master's in second languages and cultures, she also spent years in the pottery studio, on travel bike tours, walking the lakes, and traveling. Her dream is to have grandchildren nearby and to smell like cookies.

"Mary Beth Spray’s Imprint vividly recounts her long and rocky evolution from downtrodden and demoralized to confident and capable. Her brave honesty offers women in similar circumstances inspiration, hope, and reassurance that they too can achieve a happy and fulfilling life." — Marsha Jacobson, author of award-winning memoir The Wrong Calamity

"Imprint inspires readers with a story of facing and unpacking intergenerational trauma and transforming shame and dependency into freedom." — Dr. Catherine J. Griffin, author of Cult Love: Reconciling Shame & Intergenerational Trauma

"The story of the author’s extramarital relationship is often engaging . . . As Spray tells of getting her children into counseling and buying a new home for her family, she effectively reveals that she 'felt like a new person' and that she’d accepted that her 'journey was not glamorous; it was just one step at a time.'" — Kirkus Reviews