My mother, a Mormon living in a small rural town in Utah, had me out of wedlock just weeks after graduating high school. Her boyfriend was twenty-one and a heroin addict. He was, and is, absent from my life. My second father, who my mother married when I was three, wasn’t any better. Over time he revealed himself to be an incredibly hostile, abusive man whom, luckily, my mother divorced. Following their separation, my mother and I found ourselves...