HIDING FROM THE SCHOOL BUS

Bagley describes his difficult religious upbringing in rural Utah in this debut memoir.

The author’s childhood home was not a loving one. His parents, Dean and Coene, followed a “boutique Mormonesque theology” of their own design characterized by isolationism, intentional poverty, severe distrust of the government, and a rejection of modern medicine. “We weren’t allowed to eat chocolate, listen to modern music, eat pork and beef, wear shorts, or inexplicably, own our own toothbrushes,” recalls Bagley, “though lack of dental hygiene was more a product of poverty than anything else.” The family lived on five acres in Utah’s Uintah Basin, where the habitually unemployed Dean tried to wrest a living from the land. Bagley’s parents homeschooled him and his eight siblings, though the author prefers the term “no-schooled,” given the parental apathy and lack of structure that characterized his education. (Coene warned them to hide from the school bus, lest they be discovered by truancy officers and forced to enroll.) Worst of all was the constant threat of extreme violence from both parents; the author describes a horrific memory of Dean killing a kitten with a knife simply because it had scratched his hand. Bagley recounts stories of overcoming his parents’ abuse and negligence (which included bringing an accused child molester to stay in their home) to ultimately secure a proper education, start a business, and build a functional family with his wife. The author masterfully evokes the deprivations of his childhood, as when he remembers himself and his brother excitedly discovering a broken cassette tape of the Footloose soundtrack along the side of the road: “We froze in disbelief…we couldn’t believe our luck. Could we fix it somehow? Was this salvageable? Ed delicately gathered all the loose tape and tucked it carefully into his jacket pocket like he’d found buried treasure.” While the punishing narrative is sometimes hard to read, Bagley effectively demonstrates both the deleterious effects of bad parenting and the impressive resilience of children in the face of cruelty.

A harrowing and clear-eyed coming-of-age story.