Between two trailers : a memoir of resentment, regret, and redemption in flyover country / J. Dana Trent ; foreword by Barbara Brown Taylor.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A powerful, unforgettable memoir about a girl who escapes her childhood as a preschool drug dealer in rural Indiana--only to find that no one can really "make it out" until they make peace with where their story began: home

Home, it turns out, is where the war is. It's also where the healing begins.

Dana Trent is only a preschooler the first time she uses a razor blade to cut up weed and fill dime bags for her schizophrenic father, King. While King struggles with his unmedicated psychosis, Dana's mother, the Lady, a cold and self-absorbed woman whose personality disorders rule the home, guards large bricks of drugs from the safety of their squalid trailer. But when the Lady impulsively plucks Dana from the Midwest and moves the two of them south, their fresh start results in homelessness and bankruptcy. In North Carolina, Dana becomes torn between her gritty midwestern past and her newfound desire to be a polite southern girl, struggling to reconcile her shame with an ache to figure out who she is, and where she belongs.

But the past is never far behind. After persevering through childhood and eventually graduating from Duke University, Dana imagines that her hidden Indiana life is finally behind her, only to realize that running from her upbringing has kept her from making peace with the people and places that shaped her. Ultimately, Dana finds that though love for family is universally complicated, there is no shame in survival, and for those who want it, there is always a path home.

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

One Razor Blades and Preschoolers A preschooler's hands are the perfect size for razor blades. I know because I helped my schizophrenic drug-lord father chop, drop, and traffic kilos in kiddie carnival-ride carcasses across flyover country. In the 1980s, our family business was working for a big drug boss named Viper, buying and selling drugs. My parents were broke--educated but jobless, capable but troubled. My father had unemployed time on his hands and a constant dependence on mind-altering substances, so he turned to the pastime he knew in and out: street pharmaceuticals. That's when Viper found him and recruited him to serve as regional manager for a trafficking front called Carnival Captivations. My father had graduated to the big leagues. Along with his drug boss, my father used kiddie-ride cardboard boxes and fiberglass carcasses to move drugs across the country. These hydraulic ponies turned out to be the perfect mules. With each drop, we unloaded inventory and transformed bland Kmart entrances into mini carnivals that boasted dollar-generating rides for young children. An inexhaustible supply of marijuana bales and cocaine bricks occupied our single-wide trailer alongside Dad, Mom, and me. Drugs were funneled to us by Viper, who organized drops and headed the kiddie-ride business. Dad's entourage were loyal men with street names that reflected their personalities or vices. Together with them, our little family supplied midwesterners with enough uppers and downers to soothe the monotony of landlocked Vermillion County. I was eighteen months old when we moved twenty minutes south from a trailer in my paternal grandparents' yard in my namesake of Dana, Indiana (population six hundred), to the brand-new single wide on Ninth Street in Clinton (population five thousand). My mom, Judy Trent, and my dad, Rick Lewman, bought the Ninth Street trailer on credit in the early 1980s after going broke in L.A. It came standard with white-and-brown lace curtains and formaldehyde. Mom called it a shotgun house because if our enemies spent twelve-gauge buckshot through the kitchen window, we'd drop like dominoes. Our new trailer sat on a rented lot of weeds poking up through sparse gravel, twenty minutes from my father's parents, my aunt and uncle, and my two cousins. Across the potholed blacktop, I watched corn grow taller than Larry Bird by Labor Day. My earliest memories of that trailer are of the skunky smell of marijuana and the dull shine of razor blades scattered across the scratched kitchen counter. Dad was known in Vermillion County as a cult leader. Everyone called him "King." Lore had it that Dad had earned the street name playing one of Shakespeare's title characters in his Vermillion County high school play. But I knew by the way he answered the phone--"Talk to me!"--that he was King of all play. He was the one you called when you were down and wanted to be up. Back then, his long bushy beard was still black. Tall, olive-skinned, and potbellied from cirrhosis of the liver, he commanded our living room like a fire-and-brimstone preacher holding forth from a pulpit. In his signature dirty overalls, he cast his manic "veeshuns" (visions) into smoke clouds, a congregation of devoted gang members gathered to hear the prophecies. They were loyal, attentive disciples with weathered faces whose given names I never knew. Dad, too busy to bother with me before I could walk, used duct tape to fasten my hands to my baby bottle filled with chocolate milk. I sat on the kitchen counter by him all day, lifting that duct-taped bottle to my mouth and catching his marijuana exhales as weed ash fell onto his open King James Bible. My mother, whom we called "the Lady," smoked joints in bed in the trailer's back bedroom while binge-watching The 700 Club on the Christian Broadcasting Network. She was only in her forties but was in a constant state of depression and anxiety. "Your mother's never satisfied," King said once when we were chopping at the counter. "It's ah-lah-way-es some-a-thing," he added in his best Gilda Radner impression. The Lady stayed sprawled out on the king-sized bed they'd bought on layaway. She wasn't sick or inept or in need of a hiatus. She just fancied herself Victorian royalty, lounging around braless with sagging breasts in dirty sheets and a holey T-shirt that read, "I Believe in Miracles!" "Help the poor," she'd shout when she was hungry. We took her food on bed trays usually reserved for children with chicken pox or broken legs. In bed, she scribbled marginalia on the pages of How to Win Friends and Influence People and What Color Is Your Parachute? And she cried through Tammy Faye Bakker's earnest pleas for a hurting world. Unfinished "Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep" cross-stitch patterns were strewn across the bed, her stained sheets piled high with textiles. But the Lady never seemed to mind smoking King's inventory. In that trailer, she was a sitting duck who didn't even know how to pull the trigger of the Glock that Viper made us tuck away in a rust-colored pillowcase. Instead, the Lady relied on King's wild threats of knife-slicing and disemboweling his enemies, which had gotten him that far. Her cocktail of benzos and weed--and a passive death wish--didn't hurt either. I was holed up with her and King all the time, a witness to their moods and reclusiveness, their isolation galvanized by depression and the drug business. By age four, I'd been expelled from preschool for peeling the paint off the walls after leading nap-time coups. So, instead of teaching me my ABCs, King trained me up hustling, giving me a full-time job chopping weed for "lip baggies" (sandwich bags of pot). He demonstrated proper chopping techniques while I rested on the countertop, my short legs dangling from the bar. At his command, I twisted my body to cup my left hand inside his right palm. He wrapped my tiny digits over the razor blade with care, then moved our limbs together, swooping up and down over dollhouse trees. Dad taught me how to separate seeds and stems from the good bud, and we filled the lips three fingers deep. He emptied tiny brown boxes of JOB cigarette papers by the dozen and sprinkled in my finely chopped dope like a chef finishing off a gourmet dish. King could roll and spit-seal joints faster than I could slurp chocolate milk. Those small doses of loose weed and pre-rolls were necessary in order for us to sell and move kilos, bricks, and bales in bulk. They were insurance: a sample for a would-be client or a venal treat for a narc's silence. "Kids make the best hustlers," King told me the week after I was expelled from preschool. He lifted me onto the counter and coated his arms with palmfuls of petroleum jelly from the biggest Vaseline tubs Walmart sold. Then he greased up mine. "No one expects a runt in a Looney Tunes T-shirt to shank you," he explained. "Budgie!" he said and pointed to my chest, then sealed my street name with a Vaseline cross to my forehead. "Budgie," I parroted, finger to my own chest. I was thirty-six when I learned that a budgie is a parakeet. They are as skilled at call-and-response as larger parrots, perfectly mimicking their owner's vocabulary and syntax. At age four, if I were going to help him sling drugs, he needed me to, first, be his canary in the coal mine and, second, copy his every move. "Guns are for idiots," he added. "Here." He handed me my first pocketknife, a foldout two-inch blade with a horse and buggy painted on the handle. Knives teach you to accept the inevitable. "You'll get stabbed," he said, "but you'll survive. No big deal." Besides, that's what the Vaseline was for. An enemy's grip, punches, and knife points would slip right off. I'd be ready. He pumped his shiny green-bean arms to demonstrate a frenzy of imaginary switchblade thrusts to the liver. "You try," he said. I willed my spaghetti arms to slice the air. "Ten-hut! Where is your post, soldier?" he asked, saluting me. "Back wall, sir!" I said. "Ten-hut! What is your duty, soldier?" he asked. "Look around, sir!" I answered. "Everyone is your enemy, soldier," he said, his constant twitch making his heavy overalls move in jerks like the ancient Ferris wheel at the Vermillion County fair. Then he yelled out more questions. "Ten-hut! What's your assignment, solder?" "Stranger danger! Explode, sir!" I said. "Ten-hut! What do you say, soldier?" "You can't fix crazy, sir!" "At ease," he finished, leaving me to apply more Vaseline to my appendages while he wrapped a garbage bag around an armful of marijuana bricks and took it out to the trunk. Excerpted from Between Two Trailers: A Memoir by J. Dana Trent All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Minister Trent (Gifts of the Spiritual Wilderness) captivates with this coming-of-age memoir about her parents' mental illnesses, her realizing the meaning of home, and yearning to belong. Her parents met while working at an inpatient psychiatric facility in Cincinnati. Marriage and a move to Los Angeles soon followed (where the author was conceived), but bankruptcy led them to her father's hometown of Dana, IN, and then to a trailer in Clinton, IN. When Trent was a preschooler, she helped her parents chop marijuana and later acted as a lookout on her father's drug dealing drops. She writes poignantly about how father's schizophrenia went unmedicated, and her mother, diagnosed with depression and anxiety, often holed herself up in her bedroom. That left Trent as a caretaker to both. When she was six, her parents divorced, and she and her mother moved to North Carolina, where she felt torn between two extended families and longed for home. VERDICT This debut is everything fans of memoirs could hope for: a beautifully written, searing and honest tribute to family.--Denise Miller

Publishers Weekly Review

Minister Trent (Saffron Cross) recollects in punishing detail her hardscrabble childhood in Indiana and North Carolina with mentally ill parents who roped her into the drug trade. Her father, who was known as King for his religious "visions" and the band of devoted followers who gathered to hear them, taught Trent to separate marijuana stems and seeds from "good bud" and brought her with him on drug drops at age four. Meanwhile, Trent's mother, a Southern-born psychiatric nurse who'd been hospitalized after attempting suicide, languished in bed, depressed or high. When her parents divorced, the seven-year-old author was ripped away from her small-town Indiana trailer and brought to North Carolina, where she and her mother bounced between relatives' homes. Eventually, Trent returned to Indiana to spend summers with her father and grandparents, a move that stirred up her mother's jealousy: "Navigating time with my parents was a losing game of Whac-a-Mole." Despite her destructive binge drinking and overeating, Trent managed to finish college, marry, and get ordained as a minister after graduating from Duke University Divinity School. Trent's attempts to recover from her trauma get relatively short shrift, which makes the note of faith she concludes on ("Home, as it turns out, was there all along in my two very loving and very unconventional... parents") feel somewhat tacked-on. Still, fans of Jeannette Walls and Tara Westover will be drawn to Trent's blend of grit and hope. Agent: Mark Tauber, Watermark Agency. (Apr.)

Booklist Review

Professor, Baptist minister, and author Trent (Dessert First, 2019) looks back with compassion, humor, and more than a little horror at a childhood shaped by two mentally ill, larger-than-life parents. In small-town Indiana in the 1980s, young Trent helped her father package marijuana for sale while her mother spent days in bed expecting her preschool-age daughter to wait on her. When the author was six, her mother took her on a "vacation" that turned out to be permanent, moving back to her North Carolina hometown where she could mooch off wealthy relatives and leave Trent to care for herself much of the time. The one bright spot for Trent was summers spent with her grandparents and extended family back in Indiana, where she avoided the father who was becoming increasingly unstable due to schizophrenia. Resisting sensationalism with wry perspective, Trent finds forgiveness for her "educated but jobless, capable but troubled" parents and for her own missteps as she works her way towards a definition of home that knits together her current life and her past.

Kirkus Book Review

A potent memoir about a young woman's escape from a toxic childhood. Trent, author of One Breath at a Time and Dessert First, begins this harrowing account with razor blades. "A Preschooler's hands are the perfect size for razor blades," she writes. "I know because I helped my schizophrenic drug-lord father chop, drop, and traffic kilos in kiddie carnival-ride carcasses across flyover country." The author never shies away from the uncomfortable, but instead leans into her own vulnerability as she analyzes her past while attempting to find peace in the present. Growing up with parents who suffered from paralyzing mental illness meant that Trent's protection was not a priority. Rather, she was used as a pair of useful hands. Weaving poignant lyricism with deeply personal and dark stories of her attempts to release herself from the chains of her past, Trent brings readers directly into her chaotic, dangerous childhood, describing how she used her nimble fingers to pack marijuana for her father, "a regional manager for a trafficking front," while shielding herself from her volatile mother. Although Trent was assisting in her father's illegal pursuits, eventually, her mother snatched her from her trailer home in Indiana and took her to North Carolina, where she continued to struggle with poverty and her mother's mental instability. "My father's mental unsteadiness was obvious and outward," she writes. "You could look at him and guess how loud the carnival barkers in his head were. But [my mother's] ups and downs were a crapshoot. As soon as I thought I'd nailed it like a game of gin rummy, she switched strategies." As the years passed, Trent worked actively to heal and move forward with her life, graduating from Duke Divinity School and becoming a teacher of world religions. A powerfully intimate look into the struggles of American poverty and mental illness. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.