About Michael LaFleur

Michael LaFleur writes from the space between what families promise and what they deliver—between survival and transformation. My work comes out of broken systems, military bases, and hard ground, where the only way forward is through.

His approach to memoir rests on something simple: authentic transformation requires careful telling, not manufactured drama. Instead, it emerges through the kind of restraint that makes every word matter, through seeing clearly rather than explaining loudly, through the patient work of letting experience speak for itself.

Growing up on military bases and in broken homes across Wyoming’s harsh foothills, LaFleur learned that survival meant distinguishing between what was supposed to be true and what actually was. This discipline of clear sight became the foundation of his writing—a voice that honors both damage and healing without exploiting either.

His faith informs his work not through easy answers or manufactured redemption, but through the harder understanding that grace operates in the gaps where human systems fail. Transformation, he has learned, requires both human effort and something beyond human effort—a tension that runs through everything he writes.

The Cloud Grows Thin represents his belief that contemporary American memoir demands both literary sophistication and moral honesty, that readers deserve stories that neither sensationalize trauma nor offer false comfort, but instead provide the kind of hard-won wisdom that can only come from living through what you write about.