All These Fish

All These Fish A Memoir Lisa Riggs, Psy.D.

You cannot spare the body and break the spirit and call it survival. You cannot treat the spirit and ignore what the body carries and call it healing.

In the late 1970s, Lisa Riggs was a child with alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma, treated in a world of pediatric oncology that no longer exists. She lived. Many of the children on the ward did not.

All These Fish is not a survival-and-inspiration story. It is about the after — the decades when the pain that cancer and its treatment left behind was misread, dismissed, and called something else, until she could no longer work. It is about what it took to be believed, including by herself, and about the EMDR therapy that finally let her feel what she had spent a lifetime not feeling.

It is also about the children who did not come home. Billy. Rosa. All those others. Riggs wrote the book to bear witness — to count them, and to tell the truth about what healing requires. The body and the soul are not separate projects.

Release All These Fish will be available September 1, 2026, in ebook, paperback, and hardcover.