Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness

Journalist and broadcaster Sheffield debuts with a searing memoir of her turbulent childhood and its scars. The fifth of eight children born to a Mormon family, Sheffield spent much of her youth in a motorhome that traversed the country, fleeing “child-custody buttinskies” who sought to remove the author and her siblings from their parents. Lorded over by her father, a violent, self-proclaimed prophet who subjected the author to “indoctrination sessions” on her “evilness and failures,” Sheffield longed for a normal life and left at 18 to attend college. Still, depression and suicidal ideation stalked her into adulthood. Among other episodes, Sheffield describes a horrific assault from one of her schizophrenic brothers when she was 17 and the family clashes it precipitated when her father at first refused to believe her; breaking from Mormonism at 22 and later joining an Episcopalian church; and her efforts to separate childhood spiritual trauma from her adult faith (“abusive, man-made religion is a shoddy substitute for divine Relationship... I was looking for God in all the wrong places”). Though the blow-by-blow catalogues of the author’s health issues and romantic travails can grow stale, readers will be riveted by Sheffield’s unrelenting efforts to make sense of her upbringing (“I’ll spend the rest of my life discerning how God will transform my abuse for his service”) without sensationalizing or downplaying what she went through. This is hard to forget. Agent: Jonathan Bronitsky, Athos. (Mar.)