A Sugary Frosting: A Memoir of a Girlhood Spent in a Parsonage

A Sugary Frosting / A Memoir of A Girlhood Spent in a Parsonage and How I Survived Being a Preacher's Kid This memoir reveals an underside of being the preacher's kid, a public role that is rife with challenges of supporting your minister father and your minister's-wife mother and of becoming yourself, a person they may not have expected to come out of their household. Relationships in this memoir are portrayed honestly and sometimes not flatteringly. A Sugary Frosting, a phrase derived from the late Martha Blowen's journals, is a memoir of surviving religious idealism and inherited belief to undertake to become one’s self. WHAT YOU'LL ENJOY A Sugary Frosting is a step through the 1950s and 1960s that will bring the life of those years to the fore—at least as it was lived in a parsonage. In its pages, you will observe: • the viciousness of the "White Church" whose members sent hate notes to the minister. • the minister's little girl showing her rosebud petticoat to the church ladies. • women going to church wearing gloves—even in summer. • the minister's daughter smoking pot and telling her parents it was incense. • what it can feel like to be a superior lyric soprano and not wanting to sing. • going to an elite private school and hating it. • being bullied by a high school teacher. • living a life where everything had to be nice-nice. • her parents' anti-war protests that lead to being dismissed from a pulpit These—and more—stories, told artfully and insightfully, will keep you reading long past when you should be asleep. In A Sugary Frosting / A Girlhood Spent in a Parsonage, the hero comes to the realization that the religious beliefs she has inherited do not fit comfortably. From early on, she wonders "What does it mean 'to love Jesus?'" She struggles to make belief and experience mesh but as she writes, "I was too young to understand, but I knew my own experience and not belief had to be my guide."