How One Becomes Sarah Mead

Sarah is an independent and successful queer woman. At forty-years-old, she's just secured tenure at the university and she's recently gotten engaged to Sam, a transgender man. Everything is going exactly as she hoped it would and she revels in this life she was never supposed to have.

Sarah is the eldest daughter of a cult leader but had the good fortune of being born Deaf and, as her father told her, not of marriage quality. She left the cult at fifteen and never looked back. Until her aunt, the closest Sarah has had to a real mother, asks her and Sam to give her estranged sister and her young nephew a home.

Her sister is fleeing the cult and her husband who has beaten her for a decade. Now faced with having to help her sister, who is nothing more than a stranger to her, and house a child, which neither Sarah nor Sam have ever wanted, Sarah fears Mina will derail everything good they've got going. How can they take care of a woman who knows nothing but violence, fear and a cult's bastardized Christianity? How will their relationship endure what Sarah is certain will be the hateful scrutiny of her religious sister?