“Fans of Jeannette Walls and Tara Westover will be drawn to Trent’s blend of grit and hope.”
—Publishers Weekly
Between Two Trailers
J. Dana Trent, Barbara Brown Taylor
Home, it turns out, is where the war is. It’s also where the healing begins.
Dana Trent is only a preschooler the first time she uses a razor blade to cut up weed and fill dime bags for her schizophrenic father, King. While King struggles with his unmedicated psychosis, Dana’s mother, the Lady, a cold and self-absorbed woman whose personality disorders rule the home, guards large bricks of drugs from the safety of their squalid trailer. But when the Lady impulsively plucks Dana from the Midwest and moves the two of them south, their fresh start results in homelessness and bankruptcy. In North Carolina, Dana becomes torn between her gritty midwestern past and her newfound desire to be a polite southern girl, struggling to reconcile her shame with an ache to figure out who she is, and where she belongs.
But the past is never far behind. After persevering through childhood and eventually graduating from Duke University, Dana imagines that her hidden Indiana life is finally behind her, only to realize that running from her upbringing has kept her from making peace with the people and places that shaped her. Ultimately, Dana finds that though love for family is universally complicated, there is no shame in survival, and for those who want it, there is always a path home.
Meet the Characters
King and Lady
Photo: © J. Dana Trent
“The only difference between us and them is who has the keys.”
—King’s philosophy on who’s well—and who’s not.
For all his schizophrenia and over-the-top unruliness, King was, in my childhood mind, the more reliable parent. My father’s mental unsteadiness was obvious and outward. You could look at him and guess how loud the carnival barkers in his head were. If he liked you, you were his “good buddy.” But if you were shady, he’d have his blade to your belly before you could blink. Had I learned to embrace him as a friend, I could have been his daughter.
Photo: © J. Dana Trent
“A smile to all she meets, a charm to make each memory sweet.”
—The Lady’s Senior Yearbook Quote, class of 1958
The Lady's moods were as unpredictable as a dice roll. If King’s twitchy antics were an indication of his internal climate, the Lady’s penchant for bed rest was her top manipulation tool. We enabled her fantasies of Victorian royalty by serving her meals on bed trays usually reserved for children with chickenpox or broken legs. But in our little drug-trafficking family, the Lady’s catatonic dependence was more dangerous than King’s outward viciousness. The former would get you killed, King said.
Budgie (Dana)
Photo: © J. Dana Trent
While the King taught me to walk through the world seeing everyone as dangerous, the Lady moved through life like everyone had done her wrong. The result was my unending suspicion of everybody. I took up two shifting identities to cope: King’s explosive cut-throat preschool drug dealer and the Lady’s disappearing, people-pleasing servant. But my parents were really two peas in an unwell pod, staking a claim to what each of them valued the most: whose daughter I would turn out to be.
Vermillion County
Photo: © J. Dana Trent
Photo: © J. Dana Trent
Praise
“Fans of Jeannette Walls and Tara Westover will be drawn to Trent’s blend of grit and hope.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In a striking narrative of childhood trauma survival, Between Two Trailers pulls you into every breathless moment with ‘Budgie.’ Readers that exhale while rising beside her will find hope in the sweet air of redemption.”
—Carine McCandless, New York Times bestselling author of The Wild Truth
“Hopeful, hilarious, and full of resilience and redemption, Between Two Trailers is delightfully messy and deliciously rare. Each chapter ventures deeper into the author’s riveting background—a world most of us were spared from. The whole journey is weighted with important reminders of how trauma-informed stories can both educate and heal us. Dana Trent provides a road map for assembling the different parts of one’s psyche that are so often split and shattered during childhood.”
—Sarah Edmondson, actress and author of Scarred
“If Dana Trent's books were truthful, that would be enough. If they were elegantly written, that would be even better. If they spoke straight to the hearts of her readers, that would make her a writer worth reading. In fact, they are all of these things, encompassing what it means to be human on this earth, making reality more bearable because it is so clearly a reality we share. Between Two Trailers reminds me of that again.”
—Barbara Brown Taylor, New York Times bestselling author of Learning to Walk in the Dark
