In her soon-to-be-published memoir, Beyond My Wildest Dreams, Suebelle Robbins frequently speaks of how much she wanted to fit in when she was child, of how much she wanted people to like her, of how much energy she invested in being part of the crowd. It is, though, hard to imagine how anyone so vivid could ever achieve the ordinariness her childhood self sought, for her glorious extraordinariness and charm shine from every page of her life story.
Helping Suebelle to write the story of how she grew from a little girl desperate to be accepted into the confident and, as she says, “unapologetically fabulous” woman she is today has been a pleasure and a joy for all the team at LifeBook Memoirs. Wickedly funny, sharply intelligent and professional, but also refreshingly honest and self-aware, she has been a perfect author to work with.
However glamorous and exciting Suebelle finds her world to be now, her path through life has not been an easy one. Born to a serially unfaithful father and a constantly angry mother with whom she had a somewhat complicated relationship, her early years were characterised by anxiety and a marked lack of self-worth. Childhood fears grew into teenage insecurity, which emerged as a search for love and personal validation through often obsessive and destructive relationships with boyfriends. In adulthood, this search calcified into a bad marriage and alcoholism.
However traumatic all this sounds, though, Suebelle’s story is no misery memoir. No matter how low things were for her – and they were sometimes very low – she never wallows in self-pity or looks for someone else to blame. Instead, she looks herself firmly in the eye, doesn’t hold back on the truth, takes responsibility and recounts all the bad times with clarity and her trademark dry wit.
Suebelle is also very clear that she’s had a lot of fun along the way. Energetic and irrepressible, she put her teenage and college years in Texas behind her and set out to enjoy all the world had to offer a pretty and lively young woman. Embracing every opportunity that came her way, she was, simultaneously, a first-grade schoolteacher and a bunny girl – Bunny Courtney – in Boston. She also worked as a travel director, a role that had her escorting a planeload of Shriners to Europe more or less on her first day. This must have required considerable resourcefulness and courage, but for Suebelle, it was all enormous fun. She modelled, she made hundreds of friends, she had a long and happy marriage to her beloved Richard. She has had, she says, an absolute ball, and is now loving every moment of her new life as ‘Suebelle in Palm Beach’.
Writing such a lively and rich story was always going to be a thoroughly enjoyable project for Suebelle’s ghostwriter, Terri Ann, and her editor, Kate, but there were some challenges to meet along the way for her project management and writing team at LifeBook Memoirs. Anyone familiar with Suebelle’s Instagram posts will know about her often self-ironising dry humor, eye rolls and sharp observations served in a wrapper of drollery. Translating verbal tone and body language into a vivid narrative that was properly representative of Suebelle’s personality required some careful analysis of her storytelling style. What language, what syntax, which punctuation will make one sentence both spiky and poignant, or another funny, but astute and compassionate? Will Suebelle recognise herself in the shape of this story? What should be left in? Or left out? When writing about the bad times, how do we achieve a balance between honesty about how bad they were and positivity, acuity and wit?
Suebelle pictured at her book launch event with co-founders Roy Moëd and Yvette Conn and members of the LifeBook Memoirs team
In some ways, answering these kinds of questions for Suebelle was easy; charming and engaging on social media, she is even more so in person, as well as kind and thoughtful. She is a natural storyteller with an acute and analytical eye and the ability to reflect lightly, but incisively, on all the often funny, often crazy and sometimes shocking things she has done. Every time we sat down with her to write the next stage of her life, we knew there would never be a dull moment.
We at LifeBook Memoirs are very proud of the book we have made for Suebelle. Elegantly typeset on beautiful archival paper and filled with perfectly presented images, the story it tells is at once poignant, entertaining, introspective, extrovert, principled and, above all, joyous.
And what does Suebelle think of her book? Although she told its stories, chose its photographs and was involved in the cover design, she didn’t see the completed printed-and-bound book until her celebratory book launch, attended by friends, LifeBook Memoirs staff and local media, at Heritage Auctions in Palm Beach on 2nd April 2026. When she slipped her book from its presentation box and opened it for the first time, she was so delighted that she could hardly be persuaded to put it down again. If initially reticent about writing her life story, Suebelle grew to love meeting with her interviewer to work on each new instalment, and the end result is, she says, “Gorgeous!”
We could not be more pleased that Suebelle loves her book. Writing her memoir – describing her transformation from little Susan Whitworth of Texas to ‘Suebelle in Palm Beach’ – has been a wonderful experience for everyone at LifeBook Memoirs because she is, genuinely, fabulous!
Written by Kate Parry, LifeBook Memoirs editor
