A letter about our books, from the authors to our readers
 
Dear readers,    

It’s never easy to talk about the trauma of your childhood.  For both of us, reliving these experiences through the writing process was perhaps the most difficult and worthwhile thing either one of us has ever done.    
As is the case for most of the girls who went through this program, we both did a lot to repress these memories, especially the brutality of it all.  

In each book, we confess our biggest sins and celebrate our greatest victories.  We were not angels, but we did the best we could in the circumstances we found ourselves in.     

These two books tell more or less the same timeline, they tell a lot of the same events, but from each of our own very different perspectives.  While we generally agree on the big things, we have very different takes on a great many things as well. While we thought about doing the work to make it all match - we even sketched it out in a few places - we ultimately found that doing that wasn’t true to our individual stories.  It’s important to know that we made the deliberate choice to stay as true as possible to our memories in each book as we could. As such, we chose to let the discrepancies happen.     

We have both chosen to publish these books under pen names.  We do this for two reasons.  First is because even our families do not know most of the horrors we went through that are contained in these books, nor do we want them to know. Secondly, the church involved is a cult that has a history of serious violence towards its detractors, and we will not risk our safety, our family’s safety, or the safety of the other girls for a book.    

As you look at both books, you may get the idea that we somehow got a great education in our program.  While we received some excellent military training, our general academic education was almost non-existent.  We could never have written these out on our own, let alone turn our stories into coherent books.  We could never have done the work to hide the church or protect our friends on our own. Even today, some 30 years after leaving, we both struggle with expressing emotion. We relied heavily on our co-authors and interns to turn our stories into these books, into something worth reading.    

We changed the names, dates, locations, and other identifying details of every individual involved in these stories. We took great care to hide the church involved, and anything we reasonably believed might lead back to the true identities of any individual or group the book talks about.  While we are sure a few people will figure out who we are and what our program was, we ask you to respect our privacy. The church (cult, really) won’t hesitate to use extreme violence against us, and we would all like to avoid that.     

There are places in this book where our memories weren’t as clear as we would have liked them to be. In those places, we took artistic license to fill in those gaps. For these reasons, we present these books as works of fiction informed by our personal experiences. We hope that these books spur our society to take a closer look at how we treat troubled teens. We think there are many lessons to be learned from our experiences.     

But we feel we must warn you that these books are not easy reads. They deal with a lot of sadness, dark truths, and uncomfortable situations. In these books, we discuss themes of drug and alcohol use, addiction, withdrawal, sex, sexual abuse, rape, child prostitution, physical abuse, physical violence, torture, mind control, LGB issues, gay panic, religious trauma, death, and more.  You have been warned.  

Vanessa White

Ericka Brown