Bodie Parkhurst is doing it again: writing wonderful books.

Her longtime friend, known on her blog as The House Leroy, passed away, and she memorialized him, under the name of Sherry Wachter, with one of the most beautiful human photo/text book you’ll ever see, THE HOUSE LEROY.

Now she comes with ON FIRE FOR THE LORD. It’s a memoir of her childhood — if “memoir” isn’t a misnomer for a childhood with strange and uneasy blank spots. This memoir begins with her early memory of being repeatedly brutally spanked for not saying, “Jesus” when ordered to. It takes her to the point at which she, enduring a sexual encounter she doesn’t know how to refuse, unexpectedly remembers how to detach herself from the experience but can’t recall how she learned the trick.

But if you think this is a grim and joyless grind, you don’t know Bodie. She can find the funny, the beautiful, the strengthening in just about anything. Not that she makes light of her own suffering — she has too much compassion for all the people she’s been for that — but she has a lively sense of the absurd, the ironic, the odd, and can point them out without cruelty or dismissiveness.

Visit her Amazon Author page to see what else she’s written. Pick anything. You won’t be disappointed.

A WRITING PROMPT FOR YOU: What’s the first thing you remember? What’s the first thing your character remembers?

MA