Chosen (How Opening My Home Healed My Heart)

In the tradition of The Glass Castle, a poignant, inspirational memoir of a lonely girl who survived decades of harrowing abuse at home to open her heart and redefine what it is to be a family and a mom.

No child should grow up like Sandi Smith. At age three, she was locked in a closet. By age eight, she was behind the wheel of a car, and by age nine, she was forced to hunt deer for food. She was bartered as a child laborer to pick pinto beans and forced to clean motel rooms by her beautiful, schizophrenic mother and perpetually angry, inventor father. For six months, she lived alone in a trailer, stealing from the local grocery store to eat.

In the rich tradition of The Glass Castle and Educated, Sandi recounts her heart-stopping, nomadic upbringing amid the mountains of Utah, flat farmlands of Idaho, and California sprawl, as her father’s schemes and scams repeatedly failed. She escaped to college as a basketball player and worked her way through law school, rising to head of litigation for Apple and raising two children. Having built a conventional life, she never expected to re-examine the pain of her survivalist past.

A sudden move east and a chance encounter inside the parking garage at the tony, elite Sidwell Friends School forever changed Sandi’s life. She intersected with three young Black men, all football players at Sidwell, on scholarship. Sandi and her family open their home to these young men, and gradually, they share their own stories of hurt and survival with the woman they call “Momma.”

Fearlessly facing the challenges of race, class, prejudice, addiction, and abandonment, Chosen shows us how one determined mother built a family of her choosing and recovered the affirming healing power of love.