FORGED
The Making of a Woman Who Would Not Break
FORGED™: The Making of a Woman Who Would Not Break
© 2026 Julie Treska. All rights reserved.
About the Book
FORGED is a memoir about pressure. What it reveals. What it destroys. What it builds.
It begins inside a steel family in Cleveland, where identity was forged early and rarely questioned. It moves through three decades in sales — insurance, mortgages, and eventually steel and aerospace — inside industries that weren't built for women and don't pretend otherwise. And through everything that happened underneath the career: cancer, abuse, addiction, motherhood, divorce, layoffs, reinvention, the loss of a father, and the long, slow work of becoming someone you weren't raised to be.
It is not a comeback story. It is a story about what survival actually looks like up close. About the cost of being the woman who refuses to break, and what gets built in the place of what's been lost.
Steel is the setting. Pressure is the subject.
Structure
The memoir unfolds in six acts.
I. The Making. Childhood, inheritance, and the things you are handed before you know what they are. A father made of steel, a mother who was not maternal, and a girl who learns early that love is something you perform for.
II. The Climb. Breaking into steel as the woman who was told she was "not a fit," earning a seat at a table built for men, all while her father's body begins to fail.
III. The Forging. Losing her father, and the grief, reckoning, and long work of becoming that follow the loss.
IV. The Bottom. The darkest descent. Cancer, Chicago, isolation, and the years she nearly did not survive herself.
V. The Ascent. Rebuilding under pressure. A second marriage that implodes, falling in love with a woman, coming out in the middle of the steel industry, and rising into rooms she was never supposed to reach.
VI. Forged. What is left of you after the title, the company, the marriage, and the plan all disappear, and what you build next.
Status
In progress. Expected 2027.