Trudis Percival was born Gertrud in post-war Germany. The nurses called her Trudis instead. The name stuck. So did her habit of surviving things that should have broken her.

She grew up in a single room with no bathroom. She joined a girls’ choir. She fell in love with a man who beat her and told her no one would see the marks. She married him anyway. She had two children. Then her own twin sister slept with her fiancé. Not once. Twice.

Trudis left Germany for Australia, expecting adventure. What she found was a country that took her children because she had no custody order. A legal system that lets her sister force the sale of her hilltop paradise. Doctors who pointed a finger at her broken hip and said go to bed for two months.

She never stopped building. Gardens. Dachshund breeding businesses. A life from nothing again and again.

Today, Trudis lives in a small town in central Queensland. She uses a walker. She has two dogs. She does not want your pity. She wants you to know that a person can lose everything, including the ability to walk, and still refuse to disappear.

She wrote Love Hurts because silence hurt more. This is her first book. She hopes it will be her last confession.