When Katrina Anne Willis went to a reformer Pilates class in the small Ohio town to which she had just moved with her husband and four children, she got more than just an intense workout.

She had been married for 28 years and had willingly moved from the family home in Indiana to another state for the sake of her husband's job.

But her feelings were undeniable. Right from the start, she was struck with an overwhelming desire for her instructor, a lithe and charismatic woman named Cecilia.

Between Cecilia's gentle hands-on adjustments and her flirtatious magnetism, Willis' feelings for Cecilia grew and the women soon struck up a close friendship outside of class.

Week by week they became more intimate – a blossoming friendship she hid from her husband.

Cozy wine nights turned into capricious weekend getaways and, one night, a passionate moment of physical intimacy that affirmed to Willis what she had always kept buried deep within herself: that she was attracted to women and long had been.

Willis' fevered desire was far from fleeting. In fact, it was life-changing.

Within months of falling for Cecilia, Willis came out as a late in life lesbian at the age of 46, upending the quiet Midwestern life she shared with her family, before eventually getting a divorce.

It was a dizzying series of events that she chronicles, nearly a decade later, in her new, deeply personal memoir, Hurricane Lessons, which takes stock of the challenges and triumphs Willis encountered during her journey to embrace her true self with clarity and aplomb.

'I think the reason I needed to tell this story is because when I was growing up, there was no LGBTQ+ representation for anyone in my Midwest, Catholic area,' the 56-year-old writer told the Daily Mail.

'I didn't even have the vocabulary for who I was or what I was then, so I tried to fit myself into this space that never really fit. For the sake of anybody who's questioning or struggling, it's important to let people know that they're not alone.'

Willis, who drew on years of her personal journals to write this memoir, knew from a young age that she was attracted to women; one of her early recollections is of practicing kissing with a girlfriend in elementary school and enjoying it.

Later, in college, she had a drunken make-out with a beautiful female stranger at a frat party - a memory that she treasures as a sort of talisman as she later moved through the motions of domestic life, marrying her high school sweetheart and put her career on the back burner to care for their four children, as her husband advanced his career as an educator.

The slow and messy dissolution of Willis' 28-year marriage may be among the memoir's most painful wounds. She claimed that she and her ex-husband tried opening up their marriage, dating other people, and even having a threesome together, but their relationship switch-ups proved no remedy for their marital woes.

Now, Willis told the Daily Mail, she recognizes that opening up the marriage was, in fact: 'the final nail in the coffin.'

'I think we were just grasping at straws, trying to do whatever we could to try and figure things out,' she said, of opening their marriage. 'We were so desperate to try and make it work if it was going to work. I felt so guilty for being with Cecilia and wanted him to experience something that made him feel fulfilled too, even though I regretted that and it was just a disaster for us.'

While it's easy to label Willis' memoir as solely a coming out narrative, her recollections tell a much broader tale of a woman who's desperately trying to reclaim her life on her own terms to survive.

As a young girl, Willis experienced a series of harrowing life events – she wrote of her father leaving the family, child sexual abuse at the hands of a neighbor and being raped while a college undergrad. These instances resulted in her tamping down her feelings to soldier on as a 'good girl,' laboring under the expectations of her in a conservative and religious Midwestern environment.

In adulthood, this pattern of sidelining her feelings and desires continued, especially as she became a wife and mother.

Willis said: 'For so many years, I was underwater and I didn't have the language to say what I was feeling.

'I love my kids with all my heart, but those early years were hard, and while my former husband was as helpful as he could be, he had big jobs and a big education - he just wasn't around as much.

'It fell to me to make the family work. I had to sacrifice my career and take care of the kids, the house, all of the emotional labor. In a patriarchal society, when you start a family, this is the expectation.

'I was a person who wanted to please everybody and make everybody happy, so I took those roles on, without thinking much about them. But in the long run, I regret a little that I lost my career and some of the things that went along with that.'

For Willis, coming out and choosing herself has been one of the best decisions of her life. However, her choices have come with a cost: she no longer has much of a relationship with her ex-husband, who was once her closest friend, and has lost friendships over her decision to live her truth. But she has found a kind of joy in living authentically that can't be replicated.

'The very best, brightest point [of my coming out] is that I finally feel comfortable in my own skin,' she said.

'I finally feel like I know who I am and I'm okay with who I am. When I was growing up, I always felt different and strange and kind of an outsider. I just never felt comfortable in my own skin. I'm finally getting to that point and understanding all the feelings that I had when I was younger. It sounds so silly to say sometimes as someone who's 56 now, but I'm still kind of learning who I am and I think that's kind of a lovely thing.'

As for Cecilia, the winsome Pilates instructor whose presence sent Willis on this life-changing journey in the first place, their liaison was brief, but no less significant for it.

They no longer speak but, Willis said, she will 'always be grateful' for the electric connection that she and Cecilia once shared.

'I call Cecilia my catalyst,' Willis told the Daily Mail. 'I never would have discovered who I was fully without that lightning bolt that she was in my life.'