A Minor, Unaccompanied: How Flute Playing Saved Me from a Life of Homelessness, won Memoir Magazine’s 2022 Prize for coming-of-age books. Complete at 89,000 words, this unpublished manuscript stitches Alisson Wood’s Being Lolita with legacies of parental neglect in Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle, and provides an intimate homeless youth profile such as in Vicki Sokolik’s If You See Them: Young, Unhoused, and Alone in America.
Overview
A week before my fourteenth birthday, wealthy, popular twenty-five-year-old Hugo, gives me a romance novel about a girl who falls in love with an older man and saves his life. Friendless and bored, I follow the script for almost two years. But Hugo ignores me when we’re not having sex. At age fifteen, I leave home, flute in hand, to join a Wisconsin commune. Planning to restart school, I hitchhike to British Columbia for an experimental school that is a scam. Another swindled kid offers me a ride home but dumps me in California. Homeless in San Francisco with nothing but my flute for solace, I run into a commune member who trafficks me for sex. Escaping, I return home to restart the relationship with Hugo but break it off and enter a high school music program.
When my mother remarries and moves across the country I’m seventeen and stay behind to graduate and enter college on a music scholarship but struggle with self-identity. Re-encounters with Hugo and the man who trafficked me convince me I’m done with that life but nor do I want the rigid abstinence my new chosen family requires. Who am I—the wild hippie, this new strait-laced version or neither? Flute playing gives me purpose, but will it help me to find self-forgiveness and self-esteem?
Partial or full manuscript available to literary agents upon request.
Bio
As current producer of syndicated radio programs Radio Health Journal and Viewpoints, freelance writer and former magazine editor, I have over 700 by-lines. My work is in Newsweek, The Sun and numerous literary journals, including four chapters of my memoir. I was a 2023 Doris Betts Fiction Prize finalist. I live in Asheville, North Carolina, with my husband and two black dogs often mistaken for small black bears on leashes. To contact me click here, or see the contact tab in the menu.
