Learning Joy from Dogs Without

"Learning Joy from Dogs Without Collars" is about my memories of growing up, being raised by an eccentric and uniquely idealistic single mother. It is about how I was sometimes homeless and lived in shelters and in one apartment after another. It is about adventures my mother and I had, including moving across the country -- from Astoria, Oregon, a small coastal town, to Boston, Massachusetts, a bigger city on a different coast. It is about how I -- by accident, it seemed -- found myself to be the only girl on a high school wrestling team, how that worked out, and what I learned. The book is also about how I later went to Harvard, a world completely unlike the ones I grew up in; how I adapted to life there. It is about how I met my father when I was nineteen, and how my father finally became my dad.

It is about all of these things, and everything in between. It is the story of a girl coming into her own, learning and understanding her place in the world. It is about the innocence and resiliency of childhood -- the space of happiness and joy which poverty was unable to demolish or diminish.