Mints and Marbles is a collection of non-fiction short stories beginning from one of Michelle’s earliest memories as a lonely student in her first-grade classroom. It then extends to memories as a rebellious second-grader and an ambitious, yet irrational, teenager.

When her grandmother is diagnosed with dementia, Michelle and her family are forced to vacate a home worth forty-four years of stories and accept the new norm of retirement homes and her grandmother’s withering memory.

Her recollections explore themes of family, loss, acceptance, and independence that were sometimes sweet to taste and other times hard to swallow.