Memoirs don’t hand you ten tidy steps to healing. That’s not what they’re for. When they’re honest and raw, they do something deeper: they remind us we are not alone. They lean close in the dark and whisper, me too.
That’s the heartbeat of Bones Beneath the Prairie. Not a manual, but a lantern. Not instructions, but witness. A story that begins in sorrow and refuses to stay buried—because even in the hardest ground, God breathes life, and wildflowers still bloom.
I thought the cost of telling my story would be personal — maybe humbling, maybe even humiliating. I thought my family would be proud of me for speaking truth to darkness.
I was wrong. The blowback has been real, and the grief of it runs deep. But silence had already stolen too much.
We lived at the base of the One-Mile Hill, where rattlesnakes slid down into the shade of our carport. My earliest memory is standing in ruffled white panties, held back by the arm and taught the ritual: open slowly, look below the threshold, then the stoop, then the concrete. The prairie taught me to respect the dangers I could see. It took years to learn how to survive the ones I couldn’t.
Today I’m sharing the truest thing I’ve ever written. It is raw, it is revealing, and it carries the arc of my life in four words: Privilege. Silence. Darkness. Love. From the outside, mine looked like a privileged Texas childhood — but privilege can also be a veil, and silence can train a girl to walk straight into danger. At twenty-three, darkness found me. Violence threaded through the days until I was sure I would not survive the next corner. Yet the prairie still called, and in time, love — steady, faithful, and true — healed me. That is the arc of my memoir, Bones Beneath the Prairie: suspense, heartbreak, prairie light, and redemption.