The Beautiful Darkness focuses on author Joshunda Sanders' three-year journey through loss, grief and solitude, which led to reconciliation, forgiveness, and ultimately healing. The Beautiful Darkness , her candid memoir, begins in 2010 with a phone call that informs her that her father has died by suicide. It is the first of many events that transform her life dramatically for the next three years. To understand the present, she looks to her past. Sanders vividly recalls living in multiple homeless shelters with her mentally ill single mother in 1980s and 1990s New York City when homelessness was at an all-time high. Together, they survived violence, hunger, and fear. While Sanders cared for her abusive mother, she also slowly began to seek a way out of poverty through education. She went on to attend an elite boarding school and Vassar College by way of academic scholarships.

Sanders went on to pursue careers in journalism, academia, and communications before her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer in 2011. Exploring themes of faith, identity and perseverance, Sanders candidly details the heartbreak of caring for a mentally ill parent while also telling the rare story of invisible families who grow up in poverty in New York City and throughout the United States in this unforgettable memoir.