A homeschooler runaway turned schoolteacher and how she got there – Becky Proffer has her Evangelical life turned upside down when her parents separate. In the ashes of their family, she makes a new life for herself, despite her seventh-grade education, in college. In the years after, Becky looks back in an exploration of responsibility and the impact parents have over who their children become. 

A social experiment gone wrong – a Conservative Evangelical couple raised their massive brood of six children, an off-brand Brady Bunch, in the country and homeschooled them all. When the parents go through a divorce, the family is splintered but has kept doggedly limping along, the kids committed to one another despite severe dysfunction. The failure of the family and their way of life has each sibling figuring out how to begin their independent lives, with two chased off by the mother’s boyfriend. Out of that failure, the family is reborn, as the siblings become their own unit. A coming-of-age memoir in the Bible belt with all the associated religious and political awakenings, how these awakenings split families between those who chose the life and those who leave it, a story complicated by familial disorder but grounded in loyalty and integrity.