Between Two Trailers: A Memoir

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.