BACK ON TRACK How to Straighten Out Your Life When It Throws You A Curve By Deborah Norville

For Emmy Award-winning journalist Deborah Norville, currently anchor of the top-rated Inside Edition, television has been the stage for many of her successes. She was only nineteen when she conducted a live interview with the president of the United States.

Yet television provided the devastatingly public theater for Norville's professional crisis as well. The one-time host of the Today show first arrived at NBC in 1987 and later found herself in the midst of a struggle to defend her credibility when Jane Pauley left the morning broadcast. The pressure became unbearable for Norville, who left the show during her maternity leave in 1991. Many people--including Norville herself--predicted she would never return to television.

The crisis left Norville unemployed after the birth of her child and paralyzed by depression. She found herself in need of a career--and lacking the energy and spirit to find one. Like many, Norville was sidetracked--and nearly derailed--by a crisis in life, only hers had been on television for all the world to witness.

Since then Norville has climbed her way out of her professional abyss and she believes the secret to changing the course of her own life applies to anyone in crisis. In Back on Track, she recounts her own story with profiles of other women in crisis: among them, survivors of breast cancer, financial ruin, and those who've lost loved ones.

Based on her own success with reconstructing her life at its nadir, Norville offers, with warmth and wit, a clear practical ten-point plan for enduring crises and getting one's life Back on Track.

Read an excerpt

Have you ever shoved food in your face when you were hurt or angry and hated yourself at the time for doing it? Have you ever felt severely depressed? Have you ever had the sense that life is just a series of days strung together? You just plod through them and at some point it all ends? You were having a crisis. Just like me.

When I left my job as co-anchor on NBC's Today show, I went through a major tailspin. I was paralyzed by depression. There were weeks I never left my apartment or even got dressed.

And yet, when I reached bottom, I looked inside..and found within the way to get 'back on track.' The steps may seem simple, but taking them is not.

What I hope to do with this book, by sharing my story and that of many other courageous women who put crisis behind them, is to encourage you to try walking.

You can feel good about yourself. When I look back were I was "...used by NBC, dumped in a ditch and left for dead," as the Chicago Tribune put it, I feel pretty good about how far I've come. You can too.