A Minor, Unaccompanied: Memoir of a Teen Musician’s Odyssey 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 Complete at 89,000 words, this unpublished manuscript stitches Alisson Wood’s Being Lolita with Guy Trebay’s 1970s Do Something, and legacies of parental neglect in Jeanette Walls’ The Glass Castle.
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, so at almost age sixteen, I take my flute and leave home to join a Wisconsin commune. Planning to restart school, I hitchhike to British Columbia for a school that is a scam. Another swindled kid offers me a ride home but dumps me in California. Homeless in San Francisco, 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 re-enter high school.
When my mother remarries and moves across the country when I’m seventeen, I 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 a young woman determined to love myself and live life on my own terms?
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 magazine editor, I have over 500 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.
