My Family, My Friends, My Life: These Lifted Me Up Along the Way Despite seemingly endless roadblocks in her own life, author Isabell von der Waldesruh never gave up. More than anything else, that is the message she wants to convey in her moving memoir My Family, My Friends, My Life: These Lifted Me Up Along the Way. Suffering from chronic illness and feeling spiritually deficient, von der Waldesruh found herself moving between life's mountains and valleys her whole life, expressing a sense of yearning for wholeness to fulfill her hopes and dreams. Through My Family, My Friends, My Life, she offers comfort to readers: you can fight the good fight, you can finish the race, you can keep the faith.