All These Fish: A Memoir

by 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 1978, at age seven, Lisa Riggs was diagnosed with alveolar rhabdomyosarcoma, a rare childhood cancer. The treatment that cured her was, by today’s standards, staggering — and no one studied what it left behind, because almost no one had survived long enough to ask.

Thirty years later she was a clinical psychologist with a full practice when a survivorship clinic finally read her body’s history back to her. The chronic pain, the exhaustion, the symptoms dismissed for decades as anxiety — all of it real, all of it the price of the cure. Being believed was the beginning.

All These Fish is the story of what healing actually asks: trauma therapy and EMDR, a theology remade, a body slowly re-inhabited — four selves, the psychologist, the adult patient, the child on the ward, and the woman she wanted to be, learning to live as one.

Written from both sides of the couch, it is a book for adult survivors of childhood cancer, for clinicians who treat trauma, and for anyone who has been told their pain is in their head.

It is also a book about the children who did not come home. Billy. Rosa. All the others. The book bears witness — counts them — and tells the truth the counting taught her: the body and the soul are not separate projects.

It is, in the end, a book about coming home.

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