Between Two Trailers

November 27, 2023
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.

March 1, 2024

Trent grew up in rural Indiana with mentally ill parents who used her to help with their drug dealing. Trying to escape her past, she attended Duke University and became a professor and minister, but found she had to confront her childhood trauma in order to move past it--as shared in this searing memoir. With a 75K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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March 15, 2024
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.

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April 1, 2024
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.

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