“The backyard became so full of dog s—t that you couldn’t walk around it, the house stank of smoke. The fridge was bare or full of expired food more often than not, and my mother spent more and more time in her big four-poster bed, poring over the Bible,” she recalled in the excerpt.
“One night, her emotional violence became physical violence, and in the aftermath, I moved to Los Angeles, right smack in the middle of the seventh grade.”
The Vassar College graduate said her parents’ “custody arrangement basically switched” after that point and she found herself only visiting Sacramento “on the weekends and in the summer.”
“When I was 14, my mother and I drove across America along Interstate 10 to Florida, in a Winnebago that lumbered along the asphalt with a rolling gait that felt nautical,” she continued.
“My senior year of high school, she called to say she was dying,” the excerpt ended.