What is Unfixed?
Unfixed is a storytelling sanctuary for those living in the in-between. What began as a documentary exploration of life with a rare neurological disorder has grown into a multidisciplinary platform honoring the messy, mysterious, and miraculous ways we live, heal, and belong—especially when nothing gets tied up with a bow.
Here on Substack, Unfixed offers a living companion to this ethos:
— lyrical essays from my memoir Unfixed: A Story of Family, Mystery, and the Currents That Carry You Home
— the “In Defense of…” series, which reclaims the overlooked and misunderstood
— soul-stretching interviews with writers, artists, and truth-tellers exploring uncertainty, illness, identity, and the creative life
If you’ve ever found yourself outside the bounds of resolution—between diagnoses, between answers, between stories—you belong here. This is not a place for fix-it culture, but for communion. For loosening the grip on linear progress. For remembering that wholeness has less to do with perfection, and more to do with presence.
Welcome to the unfixed life.
Navigate to Where do I begin? to start reading today!
My memoir
ORDER today! Available anywhere you buy books. (October 2025 Empress Editions)
Unfixed: A Memoir of Family, Mystery, and the Currents That Carry You Home is a haunting exploration of identity, loss, and the unsteady ground of becoming.
When a midlife DNA test reveals that the man who raised her isn’t her biological father, Kimberly Warner is drawn into two parallel mysteries: one excavating the silence surrounding her beloved father’s death, the other tracing the absence of a stranger whose blood shapes her very being. As she unravels the secrets hidden beneath her family’s story, another rupture emerges—this time in her body. A mysterious illness takes hold, leaving her adrift in dizziness, and a growing awareness that her body knows truths language cannot hold.
Told through lyrical prose and imagined correspondence, Unfixed carries readers across decades and terrain, from the New Age spirituality of Warner’s 1980s childhood to the tidal unpredictability of midlife, where certainty dissolves and the soul insists on truth. This is not a memoir of resolution, but of reckoning. For anyone who has sought refuge in the known, Unfixed offers a quiet transformation: healing not as closure, but as relationship. Wholeness not as solidity, but as the willingness to remain present to what is.
With echoes of Inheritance, and the emotional undercurrents of Where the Crawdads Sing, Unfixed reveals the beauty and heartbreak of uncovering truths long buried. It is a celebration of the body’s wisdom, the resilience of the human spirit, and a poignant reminder that even in the most uncertain lives, there is space for hope, connection, and becoming. And what feels like drift may be the current carrying us home.
“Warner’s poetic prose and intimate descriptions of her inscape while grieving... plunge readers directly into her reality.” —Publishers Weekly, Editor’s Pick
“Genre-defying... A gripping, often literary memoir that ruminates on life’s unfixable complications.”—Kirkus
About me
Kimberly Warner is a filmmaker, author, and patient advocate whose work explores what it means to live fully in a body that doesn’t always feel well. After studying pre-med and biology at Colorado College and pursuing graduate training in naturopathic and classical Chinese medicine, she veered from a clinical path toward a creative one, trading diagnostics for documentary and turning questions of health into stories of meaning.
In 2015, a rare neurological condition, Mal de Débarquement Syndrome, upended her sense of gravity and direction, quite literally. That seismic shift became the seed of Unfixed, a multimedia platform she founded to amplify stories of people living with chronic illness and disability. Since then, her work has grown into a celebrated portfolio of award-winning docu-series, short films, podcasts, memoir and essays—all championing the radical notion that healing and brokenness can coexist. That sometimes broken is the fix.
Kimberly’s storytelling has earned honors from the Invisible Disabilities Association, HealtheVoices, Rainbow Advocacy, and Life on the Level. She has screened at Harvard Medical School, contributed to innovative medical curricula, and serves on advisory boards that center the patient’s voice in health care and design.
She lives in rural Oregon with her husband, David, where they tend their small farm between creative projects. When she’s not editing films, harvesting calendula, or writing for her beloved Substack audience, she’s practicing what she preaches: loosening her grip, staying curious, and letting uncertainty become a place of peace.
Her debut book, Unfixed: A Memoir of Family, Mystery, and the Currents That Carry You Home (Empress Editions, October 2025), earned a Publishers Weekly Editor’s Pick and quickly became a bestseller. It is now finding its way into the hands and hearts of readers everywhere searching for steadiness inside their own unsteady lives.
