Born to drug-dealing parents in rural Indiana, J. Dana Trent was a preschooler the first time she used a razor blade to cut up weed and fill dime bags for her schizophrenic father, King. While King struggled with his unmedicated psychosis, Dana’s mother, “the Lady,” a cold and self-absorbed woman whose diagnosed personality disorder ruled the home, guarded large bricks of drugs from the safety of their squalid trailer, where she watched TV evangelist Tammy Faye on repeat. Growing up, Dana sought to be the daughter both her parents wanted: a drug lord’s heir and a debutante minister. But when the Lady impulsively plucked Dana from the Midwest and moved the two of them South, their fresh start resulted in homelessness and bankruptcy. In North Carolina, Dana becomes torn between her gritty midwestern past and her desire to be a polite Southern girl, hiding her home life of drugs and parents whose severe mental illness left them debilitated.

But the past is never far behind. Dana was a child of the drug trade, and though she had escaped flyover country, she would never be able to escape her father’s legacy. After graduating from Duke University, Dana imagines her hidden Indiana life was finally behind her, becoming a professor and an ambivalent female Southern Baptist minister. She thought she had written a new story, only to realize that her childhood secrets kept her from making peace with the people and places that shaped her. Ultimately, Dana found that no one can really “make it” until they return to where their story began: home.