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‘Perfect Unfolding’ author visits NU

Kristy Halvorsen discusses memoir at Lykke books

NEW ULM -- Author Kristy Halvorsen spoke at Lykke Books Thursday about her memoir, “Perfect Unfolding: Seven Years of Life-Changing Solo Adventure, One Year That Broke Me Open.”

The event included a reading, audience questions, and a book signing.

Halvorsen is on tour following the Jan. 21, 2026, publication of the book.

Halvorsen began with the story of her book cover. She said the image is a composite made from several separate photographs.

“That picture is made up from a bunch of pieces. It’s supposed to look like Labrador,” Halvorsen said. “I don’t have any pictures of myself and my rig because I’m by myself. My mom took the picture of me in the backyard. That’s little me in the water.”

She said the truck and Airstream were photographed in her mother’s yard, the sky is a sunset she photographed, and an artist found mountains that looked like Labrador. The bird on the cover is an osprey, not an eagle.

“Everybody thinks he’s an eagle, but he’s an osprey. There’s a poem in the book about an osprey,” Halvorsen said.

Perfect Unfolding traces one year, from May 19 to May 19, beginning at Black Rock Mountain, Georgia. The book is 310 pages and contains 616 numbered entries with no chapters. 

Halvorsen said it was written directly from her journal and includes dates and locations for each entry.

The memoir is based on a lifestyle she began in 2017. 

“I grew up in Tallahassee, Florida. It’s not far from Georgia,” Halvorsen said. “It’s not the real Florida, there’s not many palm trees. It’s mostly oak trees and rolling hills.”

She earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering and worked as an engineer. 

At 23, she left engineering to become a firefighter and paramedic, a career she held for 14 years. She rose to station officer.

“It was so bad. I was a volunteer firefighter and would do that for free in the evenings,” Halvorsen said. “I followed my heart and did something everyone thought I was nuts for.”

She founded a mentoring and coaching practice in 2015. In 2017, she sold her house and belongings and moved into an off-grid Airstream trailer towed by a white Ram 2500 with a kayak on the roof. 

She has migrated with the seasons since.

Halvorsen said she planned to travel with a partner. After that relationship ended, her mother encouraged her to go alone. 

Within two months, she left her job and hit the road.

A central word in the book is “coddiwomple,” which Halvorsen defined for the audience.

“Coddiwompling is a made-up word. I didn’t make it up, but it’s not really defined yet,” Halvorsen said. “It just means traveling without knowing where you’re going to end up.”

She said she lives by what she calls “the tickles of my soul,” which she described as inner knowing, gut feeling, or heart.

The year documented in Perfect Unfolding took her through the southeastern U.S., Quebec, Labrador, Newfoundland, and across the northern and western U.S. 

The map in the book shows the route, which includes 150 miles of dirt road in Quebec.

In Labrador and Newfoundland, she hiked and biked remote trails. 

The prologue describes a bike crash in Newfoundland where she injured her right hand.

“I lay sprawled in leaves and scraggly shrubs. With each quick breath I took, my bike rose and fell on my chest,” Halvorsen read.

She said she walked to a trailhead with no cell service and met two hikers, one who identified as career military. He asked where her partner was.

“I’m traveling alone,” Halvorsen read. “You don’t have anyone to help?”

She said she later reached her truck and had to drive several hours to a hospital. She had no health insurance in Canada at the time.

Halvorsen also discussed her journaling practice. She said she did not keep a journal before July 2017, when she met a couple, Danielle and Fabian, on the dirt road in Quebec.

“Do you journal? I said no, I’ve never journaled. She said, ‘You’ve got to journal your life,'” Halvorsen said.

She said she started that day, and six months later realized she was living a year that should be a book.

During the reading, Halvorsen read entry #3, dated May 21 on Highway 64, North Carolina. In it, a man in a truck next to her at a red light says “Nice rig” and asks where she is headed.

“North,” Halvorsen read.

An audience member asked, “When you quit your job and took up traveling, did you have a lot of people say, ‘Why are you doing it?'”

“Who leaves at 38? I was six years into a place that I could have stayed my whole career,” Halvorsen said. “People were like, ‘You’ve worked twelve more years and you are set for the rest of your life.'”

Another audience member asked, “Did you ever feel safe as a female out there alone?”

“I really realized that fear unless something is attacking you in the moment, all the other fear is just your imagination gone wild,” Halvorsen said. “People ask what do you do if you don’t feel safe. I leave.”

A third audience member said, “I was surprised at how easy it was for you to just make friends with strangers.”

“Each person I spend a moment with alters the hymn and fit of my soul,” Halvorsen read from entry #173. “Travel seeps into my bones and changes me forever.”

A question was asked about her mother, who appears throughout the memoir. 

Halvorsen said her mother lived in Florida her whole life and had a 14-year stage four cancer journey after being told she had six months to two years to live. 

Halvorsen became her full-time caretaker for the last year. Her mother read two drafts and died 30 hours before launch.

“She was there the whole time I was editing the book,” Halvorsen said. “She passed 30 hours before it launched.”

She said she now wears her mother’s wedding ring and necklace and hangs wind chimes where she parks.

“It’ll be no wind at all and all of a sudden, especially first thing in the morning, I’ll be sitting outside and I’ll hear a ting,” Halvorsen said.

Halvorsen closed with a final reading:

“If you feel that subtle tug towards something unknown, that tickle of your soul urging you toward a life that makes no logical sense, trust it.”