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5*Star Review from
Book Review Directory, November 2017

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Carol Marsh has no idea what to expect when she founds Miriam’s House, a care home for homeless women living with AIDS in Washington, D.C. Growing up in a stable, loving family, she always felt a passion for helping others less fortunate than herself, and she believed her role as executive director at Miriam’s House would give her the opportunity to serve a group of women often shunned and neglected.

What Carol doesn’t realize is that these women, who suffer the debilitating health effects of AIDS and also struggle with addiction, mental illness, and emotional trauma, would, in turn, teach her so much about herself.

Nowhere Else I Want to Be is beautifully written in the honest voice of a woman who is unafraid to reveal her own personal struggles and heartaches in serving the women of Miriam’s House. At times Marsh creates poetry with her vivid descriptions of the scenery, the women, their conversations, and the memories she’s had with them.

She uses flashbacks and foreshadowing to move seamlessly from the stories that she’s chosen to share and her own thoughts on the tragic history of black women suffering from AIDS. While Marsh’s choice not to recount her thirteen years at Miriam’s House in chronological order can be overwhelming to the reader who also has many characters to remember, it keeps the reader interested even though the book is quite lengthy.

Marsh shows her love for the women of Miriam’s House in the way she gives each woman a unique personality: She crafts descriptions of the women’s physical appearances, their voices, and their behavior in such detail it’s as if the reader has met each woman personally and spent time with her. Through Marsh’s storytelling, we’ve watched horror movies with Kimberly, sampled chitlins with Tamara, and observed interesting characters with Gina during emergency room visits.

Marsh shares the times of celebration–Christmas traditions, Miriam’s House anniversaries, and when women, like Kimberly, eventually improve in health and move out, but more often the stories are more tragic: women who die alone in the hospital, who leave young children behind, or who themselves are not much older than children. In this way, she memorializes these women, who would have been otherwise forgotten, and which makes their deaths–so many deaths–that much more heartbreaking.

As much as this is a story about the lives of these women who struggle to overcome addiction and face their debilitating health and imminent deaths bravely, Nowhere Else I Want to Be is also about the impact these women have on Marsh. What is perhaps most refreshing about the narration is Marsh’s honest reflection of herself.

As amazing as it is that she has given so much of herself to Miriam’s House, she is open about how her passion to serve others is tied closely to her need to be liked by others. In working with women who are vulnerable and mistrusting and taking on the tough role of enforcing unpopular rules to help women addicted to drugs and alcohol, Marsh realizes that true love is about serving others without expecting them to make her feel good about herself.

As enlightening as it was for her to come to this realization, it takes tense encounters and some big mistakes with the women and staff at Miriam’s House to slowly break the addiction of seeking others’ approval, which many adult readers can identify with.

During her first years at Miriam’s House, Marsh finds it difficult to assimilate into this community of black women with whom she has little in common. In order to truly help them, she has to come to terms with her own prejudices. As a white woman who grew up in a community where everyone spoke and looked like her, she comes to realize judgments that she didn’t even know existed.

Having never been addicted to any substance, she has no idea how difficult it is for these women to break this habit that worsens their health. Through living with them and witnessing their heartaches, Marsh develops a love for these women and becomes their greatest advocate.

In Nowhere Else I Want to Be, Carol Marsh describes the harsh realities that homeless women living with AIDS face. She gives the women of Miriam’s House a voice to share their untold stories–some of hope, but most of tragedy–with an elegance that makes her memoir unforgettable.
Recommended rating: 5 out of 5 stars
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5*Star Review from
​Readers' Favorite, October 2017

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  Nowhere Else I Want to Be: A Memoir by Carol D Marsh is an inspiring memoir that redefines the sense of humanity in a world where human values are quickly replaced by an egoistic culture. In this spellbinding memoir, the founder of Miriam’s House — a residence for Washington, DC’s homeless women with AIDS — shares her journey through the first ten years of her project. The reader is immediately transported into another side of Washington, a grim reality of suffering and pain that is ignored by those who hold the power to make the changes that could affect millions of lives. This is a story of one woman’s courage to step out of her world to confront the difficult reality of suffering and pain in others, a journey that is filled with powerful challenges. 

Carol D Marsh takes the reader with her through this story, confronting racism at its deepest core, struggling to create spaces where homeless women can experience hospitality and reconnect with their humanity. Readers will meet people like Kimberly, a woman who suffers from alcohol addiction, and Alyssa who longs for a mother’s touch, having been abandoned by her own mother. It’s a story that shows readers how, in the midst of the worst form of suffering, there is a light shining; that in the prostitute, there is a child of purity, and that in the distant, intolerant person, there could be someone wounded, yearning for love. 

Nowhere Else I Want to Be: A Memoir is a story of love and compassion, a memoir that brilliantly articulates values that our society needs to be a better place. I enjoyed how Marsh’s sense of humanity comes across in her narrative. I was stunned by her courage and her selfless spirit, reaching out to embrace the destitute in very difficult and trying circumstances, most often putting her own life in danger. This book - just like the work of Jean Vanier, the founder of L’Arche - will change the way we look at others, especially those less fortunate than us. It brought tears to my eyes and awoke deep sentiments of compassion and a love I haven’t felt before. (Reviewed by Divine Zape) 

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Link HERE to the original article.

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5*Star Review from
Authors Talk About It, April 2017​

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Nowhere Else I Want to Be is Carol Marsh’s heart-wrenching memoir of her time living and working at Miriam’s House in Washington, D.C. She founded Miriam’s House in 1996, as a place for homeless women suffering with AIDS and addiction to receive the care, shelter, and safety that they so desperately needed. In providing for these women, who came from backgrounds incredibly different than her own, Carol had to learn to face her own shortcomings: privilege, discrimination, poor leadership skills, and an overwhelming, yet often denied, desire to be liked. In doing so, she, along with the staff and residents of Miriam’s House, transformed it into a safe haven for victims of AIDS and their families, saving dozens of lives in more ways than one. 
 
In terms of content, Nowhere Else I Want to Be is certainly not the easiest book to read. It is rife with tragedy, from abandonment to parental neglect, devastating illness to inevitable death. It weighs on the heartstrings in a manner that most books cannot achieve, largely because the stories Carol Marsh shares are all real. These “characters,” who often seem larger than life in some respects, existed once, and now, do not. It’s an awful feeling, to fall in love with each quirky, lovable woman as Carol did, only to be forced to face their eventual demise. However, the tender tone in which each woman is described is admirable and honorable, shining a spotlight of love and acceptance on an otherwise horrific life. It’s devastating, but profound, in all the best ways.  
 
Nowhere Else I Want to Be is not a book easily defined, as it balances perfectly the qualities of humor, love, sadness, disdain, and acceptance, combined into one spectacular memoir. Carol Marsh takes her readers on the same journey she once walked, alongside society’s forgotten as they struggle to better themselves, contribute to communities who continuously reject them, and just survive, at any cost. It wasn’t, and still isn’t, easy, but it is forever worth it. Nowhere Else I Want to Be is a treasure as much as it is a tragedy, if for nothing else, for Carol’s bold, dignified, and honest approach to a truth best not left forgotten.

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A&U Magazine
February 2017

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The book that really jump-started Carol Marsh’s imagination as a teenager was Catherine Marshall’s Christy. “I dreamt of being like Christy,” she recalls, “and going to work with poor mountain families—later, Indians on reservations, and later still, overseas with the Peace Corps—and helping people who needed me.” She saw herself living “a life of service in which I would make things perfect for some small village or group of children. For that they would, of course, love and appreciate me.”

Somewhere along the way, Marsh realized that her calling was working with women in need. So, in 1996, she founded Miriam’s House, a place for homeless women in the Washington, D.C., area who were struggling with HIV and AIDS. Each woman came to Miriam’s House with a painful back story all her own. Claudia was mentally ill. Rebecca had been incapacitated by a stroke and communicated by pointing to pictures or words in a little book that one of the interns put together for her. Laila had contracted the virus from a blood transfusion following a car accident during her childhood. Alyssa, one of the youngest residents, had been pimped out by her mother, who had “needed the money to pay the drug man.”

Marsh and her husband Tim lived at Miriam’s House, and she learned that there was much more to being the director than she’d imagined. She accompanied residents to the ER; sat by deathbeds; and dealt with staff issues and substance-abuse relapses, learning a few truths about herself in the process. But what gave her “real joy,” she discovered, “was relating on an intimate level with the residents.” Over time, “being in service” morphed into “being present” for the residents, and “[t]here was humility in ceasing to help the vulnerable and commencing to be with them. To stay with them.”

Marsh paints vivid word-pictures of the women of Miriam’s House, enabling us to enter their lives as much as it is humanly possible to. And we come away from the book moved by both the story she tells and the honesty with which she tells it.
(T J Banks)

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The herb garden at Miriam's House, 2008.

The nook in the Miriam's House garden.