TRIGGER WARNING

The Divine Traumedy of Nicki Joy: A True Grime Tale

(Publisher: Verisimilitude Press | October 7, 2025)

If you’ve ever pleaded for love, hoped for love, mistrusted love, sabotaged love, started with lousy family-grown ideas about love, compared and despaired about love, or doubted your lovability, then The Divine Traumedy of Nicki Joy: A True Grime Tale is perfect for you.

Distinguished licensed marriage, family, and child psychotherapist Dr. Nicki J. Monti has long been internationally recognized both privately and on reality TV as therapist to the stars. Her road to success was rocky, though, as before that she was Nicki Joy Shouldar Bohm Berke Ruiz Monti. That this complicated name includes two fathers (biological and adoptive) and three husbands (mild-mannered and sweet; charismatic and brutal; boldly eccentric and protective) is just the start of Nicki Joy’s elaborate life story. What fills in the story includes early parental neglect and abandonment, emotionally sexual incest, generational alcoholism, sex-drugs-alcohol-food addiction, violent brutality, illegal adventures, divorce, vivid experiences with dying and death, and frequent edgy, questionable life choices.

Nicki Joy has lived many different lives in this one lifetime, including: the good bad/ girl, the bad/good girl, the desperate-for-love girl, the psychic, the druggie, the spiritual seeker, the girl who married her college sweetheart, the entrepreneur who launched a phone sex business, the actress, the caregiver, and the widow.

Her book, The Divine Traumedy of Nicki Joy: A True Grime Tale (Verisimilitude Press; 10/7/2025) is a change-the-narrative roadmap for anyone who’s ever doubted love, lost hope, lost faith, struggled with self-loathing, felt marginalized, felt discarded, looked for love in all the wrong places, decided that food, drugs, alcohol, and sex were the answers, or faked it while hoping to make it. Above all else, The Divine Traumedy of Nicki Joy is a cautionary tale with a happy ending.

Author Bio

Dr. Nicki J. Monti is a private practice psychotherapist and world-renown teacher, group leader, speaker, television and radio personality, and author of several books, including Stuck In the Story No More: Breaking down the Defenses that Define You and Bind You and Our Love Matters: Find It, Fix it, or Let it Go. She has long been internationally recognized both privately and on reality TV as therapist to the stars. Dr. Nicki’s main interest is identifying and learning how to dance with the patterns that guide our lives. She’s known as a straight-shooting teacher who truly believes that change is a matter of choice. Her soon-to-be-released book, The Divine Traumedy of Nicki Joy: A True Grime Tale, is described as a gritty, witty, provocative, dark, sex-drugs-rock-the-boat cautionary tale about how it’s never too late to learn how to love and live.