MAYA BLUE

BRENDA COFFEE is a published writer, photographer, and filmmaker with a BA in journalism and film. An avid adventurer, dynamic speaker, and successful businesswoman, she was managing consultant and board member of a public company she sold to Big Pharma. Coffee is the creator of two Top 10 websites, including 1010PARKPLACE.COM, home to her popular BRENDA’S BLOG, which reaches the most powerful demographic in history: women over 50. She resides in Texas.

“Coffee demonstrates her considerable powers as a storyteller and a wordsmith… delivers suspense and action that rivals any thriller.” —The Kirkus coveted starred review, nominated for the 2025 Kirkus Prize and the 2025 Kirkus 100 Best Nonfiction Indie Books

“A high-stakes, raw memoir of addiction, survival, and reclaiming power from the shadows of chaos. This is one you won’t forget.” —Maria Shriver’s 2025 Summer Reading List

“MAYA BLUE reads like a Netflix series. Brenda Coffee’s compelling memoir reminds us of the importance of seizing our power.” —Lee Woodruff, author of New York Times best-seller In An Instant

“This riveting memoir reads like a thriller. Beautifully written with courageous self-reflection, Brenda Coffee’s harrowing story of survival took my breath away.” —Laura Munson, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of This Is Not the Story You Think It Is and Willa’s Grove

“Five stars! I can’t wait to see this memoir on the screen.” —Linda Sivertsen, New York Times best-selling author & host of the acclaimed Beautiful Writers Podcast

“Moving at a relentless pace… MAYA BLUE is a harrowing memoir about existence on the edge and living to tell about it.” —Foreword Reviews

“ONE OF THE YEAR’S MOST THRILLING READS. Some memoirs invite you to sit quietly and listen. MAYA BLUE does the opposite. Brenda Coffee’s story swings the door wide open and pulls you into a life that starts like a dream and veers, chapter by chapter, into places you don’t expect to go. It reads with the tension of a thriller, yet it’s rendered with the candor and empathy of a confidante.” —BookTrib

“Brenda Coffee has brought us a memoir that is wonderfully hard to put down.” —Peter Petre, former Executive Editor, Fortune Magazine

“A memoir of unusual strength, resilience, resonance, and purpose… At times, astonished readers will do well to stop reading for a moment and remind themselves that the experiences of this remarkable woman and brilliant storyteller are distilled from real life rather than the sweeping imagination of a titan of fiction.” —Readers’ Favorite, Five Stars & Bronze Book Award for Nonfiction

1. Can you identify with author, Brenda Coffee, who, at such a young age, worshipped and idolized her older, established and prominent husband?
2. Brenda wanted to be more than arm candy, so she read newspapers and business magazines in order to be better informed for a worldly sophisticated man like Philip. Have you ever tried to be what you thought the man in your life wanted or needed? If not, why not?
3. How does the title MAYA BLUE, the strongest most resilient pigment ever created, relate to the message of the book?
4. Can you relate to giving up your voice in a relationship or a marriage?
5. It took Brenda 30 years to begin writing MAYA BLUE. Is there something in your life you’ve needed time and distance from to put it in perspective, much less talk about it with other people?
6. Book reviewers comment on the raw honesty of Brenda’s writing and the way she shares her emotions on the page. Have you tried writing about the difficult times in your life, and has writing helped you deal with it? Has it helped you see the truth, not how you want to remember it?
7. What are some of Brenda’s experiences that made you look at your own life? Did they help you see your own experiences in a different way?
8. What are some of the takeaways from MAYA BLUE?
9. If you could ask author, Brenda Coffee, one question, what would it be?
10. Share a favorite quote from the book.

EXCERPT FROM MAYA BLUE

CHAPTER ONE

I’VE BEEN WATCHING HIM THROUGH THE BINOCULARS
from my bedroom window. A big burly weightlifter type, wearing a short-sleeved polo shirt that looks two sizes too small for him. A few moments ago he set off the alarm inside the house when he ignored the Private Property—No Trespassing sign and did a one-handed vault over the gate at the foot of our driveway. Like jumping over one of those plastic safety gates that keep puppies and children from falling down stairs, he made it look effortless. With long purposeful strides, he hikes up the hill to the house and then takes the winding front steps two at a time.

When I open the front door, there’s no, “Hi, my name is . . .” He skips the niceties and gets straight to the point.

“I have it on good authority that whoever lives here needs a bodyguard.” He pauses long enough for the full measure of what he said to register and then adds, “And they better watch their step.” His voice is even and well-modulated, with no hint of the implied threat he just delivered, and his eyes drill into mine like he has every right to be here.

Up close, he’s taller than I first thought, and his chest and upper arms look as though they’re straining to break free from his shirt. He’s an exaggerated muscle man clothed in preppy orange sherbet with a tiny polo player on his chest.

My first inclination is to ask how he knows we need a bodyguard. Instead, I swallow the urge to engage him in conversation. This is the kind of moment I’m good at. Pretending I’m fine and not afraid of anything when I’m not fine. Dubious skills I’ve raised to an art form.

In a tone as calm as his, I look at him and say, “You must have the wrong house.” We both know that’s not true. For starters, there are no other houses anywhere near where I live.

I close the door in his face and watch him retrace his steps down the hill. He pauses for a moment until he sees me, standing in the window, watching him through the binoculars. For a time he fades from view, concealed by the six matching post oak trees that arch from either side of my driveway and meet in the middle like a dappled green porte cochere. When he emerges on the other side of the trees he vaults over the gate, swinging his body in one continuous movement as though he’s an Olympic gymnast. I watch as he crosses the road and disappears down the access road of the freeway like he’s never been to my house and knows nothing about me or my husband, Philip.

The burly guy was the messenger, but the real question is: Who’s brazen enough to send such a malevolent message? It’s not the first. Especially if I count the men in suits, driving a four-door sedan, who stop at the foot of our hill and empty the contents of our garbage can into their trunk. But even that wasn’t the first time.

I steady my binoculars and focus on the Exxon station across the street, searching for signs of the stranger who knocked on our door. Until now, I didn’t have a possible face to go with the voices I heard outside my bedroom window or the shadows that moved back and forth in the gap between the bottom of the bedroom door and the floor. Perhaps he was the one who’d brushed up against the other side of the door when Philip was passed out in bed beside me. A result of too much cocaine and alcohol.

The sickly little girl I used to be, the one with asthma who slept on four and sometimes five pillows just to breathe, never could have imagined she would one day pull a shotgun from a secret compartment next to her bed. Or that she would walk naked and barefoot to the door and chamber a round—an unmistakable sound to anyone who isn’t deaf—and fling open the door in time to see three grown men, tripping over one another as they stumbled down the stairs and out the dungeon door. Men in dark slacks who’d overridden our alarm system, not punks in blue jeans who’d busted open a window to steal a stereo. But even that wasn’t the first time, or the second, or the third. And I can’t forget the people who break into Philip’s lab, or rifle through the papers on my desk upstairs, or leave my sheer black thigh-highs in the same drawer as my belts. Something I would never do.

I sink into the sofa in front of the bedroom window and scan the driveway and the bottom of our hill at the intersection where Judson Road crosses over the freeway. There’s an endless line of traffic on IH-35, the north-south interstate that stretches from the Mexican border, past my house in San Antonio, Texas, up through the American heartland to Duluth, Minnesota. Like every other day, it’s bustling with cars and midsize trucks and eighteen-wheelers. Busy people going about their day, oblivious to the sinister stranger who knocked on my door. People who are clueless about the respected Dr. Jekyll and the haunted Mr. Hyde who’s crept into my bed. The same man who’s my husband and, until three years ago when the cocaine and alcohol took over, made me feel safe and loved.

Perhaps I’m reading more into the burly guy’s message than I should. Maybe he’d been playing a prank, or maybe he was one of the curiosity seekers who wanted to say they’d been to the infamous “Spy House on the Hill.”

Like the old man and his granddaughter who let carrier pigeons go in our driveway, or the notorious “motorcycle club” who brought a professional photographer with his panorama camera to take their Christmas card photo in the same place. Twenty members—one with a small silver skull braided into his beard—wearing matching vests had roared up our hill and parked their bikes side-by-side as the sun set and the city lights shimmered behind them, and their motorcycle babes stood off to the side and watched.

I’ve lived here for ten years, behind a locked gate on the highest hill in town. Even before we bought the abandoned “Spy House on the Hill,” as it’s known, it was a place wrapped in mystery and fabled stories. It’s one of those houses people talk about and wonder who lives here. If the stories about it are true. An intriguing dwelling shrouded in history and hearsay. A three-story, 6,400-square-foot Art Deco treasure that safeguards and yet screams of scandalous secrets hidden inside.

This afternoon, before the burly guy knocked on my door, I’d been sitting here trying to get a handle on how my life had gotten so far off track. It’s difficult to comprehend that I’m at the center of another one of the house’s shocking secrets. One that began with my husband, Jon Philip Ray, a brilliant and prominent entrepreneur admired by everyone, a man I’ve loved and worshipped most of my adult life—since we first started seeing one another when I was twenty-one and he was thirty-three. But now we’re keeping a secret so dark, it feels as though we’ve descended into quicksand, and the only way out has collapsed into a sinkhole behind us.

The stranger at my door has confirmed what I’ve known since childhood: Neither my parents, my husband, a locked gate, the sign at the foot of the hill, nor an alarm system can protect me. I’m the only one I can count on to be here for myself, and I live in a world where I’m afraid to show my vulnerabilities for fear they will rob me of the strength I need to survive. But I don’t allow myself to dwell on these things or I’ll stay rooted in fear and wind up powerless like Mother.

I’ve never understood why Mother likes being the victim. I didn’t get that gene or maybe I’ve edited it out of my DNA. As far back as I can remember, even before we role-reversed, I was the grownup in our relationship: ready, if necessary, to respond to her emotional meltdowns. Even as a young child, I knew how to hang on and survive in a crisis.

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” she’s fond of saying. Sometimes she’ll quote from My Fair Lady and drop the “H” from Henry and Higgins as Eliza Dolittle does. “You think I should be in the looney bin! Well, just you wait ‘enry ‘iggins. Just you wait!”

When there are no further signs of the burly guy, or of “Guido and Little Louie,” the names Philip and I’ve given the guys who steal our garbage and the ones who break into our home, I return the binoculars to the windowsill. Maybe instead of sitting here, thinking about them, I should be asking myself how Philip got so far off course. He’s the last person anyone would suspect of making drugs. Cocaine to be exact.

Or maybe instead of wondering how Philip lost his way, I should be asking myself why I haven’t asked him to stop what he’s doing. Why I haven’t said, “Shut down the lab, or I’m leaving you.”