Follow along as I work toward memoir publication.

          PROM QUEEN IN A MILK BUCKET

Carolyn Trunnell comes of age in a Mormon family in the 1950’s and ‘60’s.  Her parents attract a following of admirers for their ability to produce hordes of children—seventeen in all—putting them on stage to sing and tap dance.  She is devoted to her fun, hard-working bricklayer father.  Her family is poor, the house is filthy, but life is happy…except for the father’s occasional fits of rage.  When he’s happy he drags the family from town to town for quirky moneymaking ventures, to escape bill collectors, or whenever the grass looks greener.  Other times he beats the children.  In public, her mother, an accomplished singer and concert violinist, lives to show off her talents and her large family.  Unable to manage the household, she conceals their home life from the public. 

The family lives without running water or clean clothes.  The children keep each other from freezing at night in rundown hovels sleeping spoon-style in crowded beds.  Their father makes even the most difficult situations seem like a circus.  As they careen through life, the bond between family members tightens as they pull together to keep up the family image, and help each other survive hardship. 

Carolyn  finds ways, under near-impossible circumstances, to look like "Other People"--even if it means scrubbing up in a milk bucket.  She sews her own clothes and studies hard to rise to the top of her class. 

Will Carolyn continue to ride the "crazy train" led by her charismatic father to celebrity nirvana, or will she jump off before it crashes?  Read my sometimes entertaining, albeit gut-wrenching account of growing up a daughter of Heber Trunnell.

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