(RNS) — “A preschooler’s hands are the perfect size for razor blades.”

That’s the first line of J. Dana Trent’s searing coming-of-age memoir. The book recounts her early life growing up in a trailer in western Indiana with mentally ill parents who roped her into their drug trade, tasking her with chopping marijuana at the kitchen counter and later acting as a lookout on their drug dealing drops.

The memoir, “Between Two Trailers,” is part of a growing genre of books that describe in harrowing detail the abuse and neglect of parents caught in a maze of mental illness and religion.

Trent, a writer who teaches world religion at Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh, North Carolina, has written a handful of inspirational books about finding meaning, slowing down and mourning loss.

J. Dana Trent. (Courtesy photo)

This memoir is far more raw and poignant, as she exposes her father’s schizophrenia and her mother’s personality disorders and depressions. The couple met in a locked psychiatric ward in Cincinnati.

Both were devotees of the Rev. Robert H. Schuller, the apostle of positive thinking and self-help and one of America’s first televangelists. At age 7, her parents split up, and she followed her mother to North Carolina, where they bounced around from one rental to the next after her mother filed for bankruptcy.

“My father’s mental unsteadiness was obvious and outward,” she writes. “You could look at him and guess how loud the carnival barkers in his head were. But (my mother’s) ups and downs were a crapshoot. As soon as I thought I’d nailed it like a game of gin rummy, she switched strategies.”

RNS spoke to Trent about her turbulent upbringing — both her parents have since died — and how she has healed from the trauma. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

Talk a bit about what drew your father both to the Rev. Robert Schuller and to drugs.

He grew up in Dana Community Bible Church, which is a rural church in western Indiana. But his parents’ 1940s and 1950s religion was not the religion he wanted. When he went to college in an effort to avoid the draft in Vietnam, he took on this cult-like persona of a prophet who had actual disciples. That’s when he began probably also to have his schizophrenic break. But religion was always deeply rooted within him, inasmuch as he would chain smoke joints over his King James Bible and the ashes falling on Leviticus 19. It was an amalgamation of those early childhood years and wanting to reject that traditional Christianity but never really being successful in finding something that worked, probably because of his schizophrenia.

One of the jarring things in the book is this strong spiritual side, coupled with street-gang lawlessness. How did he reconcile that?

He didn’t. He grew up in the county where the motto was, ‘If you wanna kill someone, you do it in Vermillion County.’ And that motto was touted to me over and over in those years from 0 to 6. There was an apathy toward doing the right thing. That’s one compartment. His mental illness was so powerful. He began to embrace it as a shield that he called “you can’t fix crazy.” That was another one of his favorite mottos, meaning that no one, not a kingpin, not a cop, not a doctor wants crazy on their hands. So I think in the end, for him, his self-described craziness far outweighed any religious tendencies, but they were in constant struggle with each other. And he didn’t seem to have that sort of intuitive nature most of us have that these things are actually diametrically opposed.

Your mom wanted to get away from all that, right?

She did. She hated trailer life. And I think that’s why she stayed in bed to guard the drugs most of the time, including her own mental unwellness. She saw herself as better than Indiana white trailer trash. And so that was always the point of tension for her. It was a classism thing, even though she wasn’t upper class growing up in rural North Carolina on a tobacco farm. She wanted to be a cared-for woman, because she herself was struggling with significant mental unwellness and several personality disorders.

Religion did not play as big a role with your mother. She traded Robert Schuller for motivational speaker Tony Robbins. What was her religious journey like?

“Between Two Trailers” by J. Dana Trent. (Courtesy image)

She also rejected that 1940s and 1950s Christianity as old-fashioned. And so when we moved back to Reidsville, North Carolina, after she went bankrupt, she leveraged those old church ways to keep us housed and fed and keep me entertained with babysitters. I lived and breathed at the church because it freed my mother from having to really supervise me or take care of me. So she worked the system of religion to her advantage, whether it was the First Baptist church or Tony Robbins to keep her own self lifted out of these deep depressions.

Was church a safe place for you?

Oh, it was. Church was like my grandparents in Indiana where I saw people actually behaving like adults. It was like going from ketchup sandwiches in the Ninth Street trailer to candy spaghetti at grandmother’s table. I actually got a glimpse of what adults looked like and acted like. They knew that adults should be adults and children should be children. And I really needed those boundaries and I needed that care in those formative years from 12 to 18.

You write that the decision to go to Duke Divinity School was at your mom’s prompting. You wanted to go to law school.

Yes, because she raised me to be a helper. Her nickname for me was Revy. And so yes, I think that was her plan all along, as soon as I was quasi able to take care of myself at age 6. That’s when she cemented in her head that I could take care of her, including her spiritual and religious needs. And that’s a through-line that worked all the way to her death. I was there for her last breath and that’s exactly how she wanted it.

Where are you now, in terms of your religious life?

I’m much more contemplative in my religious life and that really comes from a sense of healing. The healing is not going to happen externally, I’ve got to go inward. And so now I’ve become much more quiet and contemplative, which helps me do the work of reconciliation.

Given the circumstances you grew up in, it’s amazing how grounded and productive you’ve been. This is your fifth book. How did you develop those practices?

It’s also a response to seeing two parents who weren’t productive, who were lazy in and of themselves, but sort of insinuated that I was lazy. And so it’s two threads of never wanting to be lazy or feel like I’m lazy. And also the other thread is sort of this deep-seated hustling thread that my father instilled in me — that scrappy hustle, you’ve got to get out there, get dressed and act like you’re somebody. Even though they didn’t do it, they taught me those lessons of always hustling. Those are two seeds that have stuck with me and wake me up every morning at 5 a.m. to feel like I am somebody.

Do you envision this book helping people heal from bad religion?

I think it’s for anyone who has been traumatized by religion, or a family member or an adult in their life has leveraged religion in a way that didn’t make sense with the world around them. How can you be raised by these two fervently religious adults who have an illicit business and are abusive and neglectful in their own household? And I think a lot of adult children are coping with that and have been raised in very similar situations where the religious talk didn’t match the behaviors. And so I hope this book will help them see themselves in this story and reflect on the ways in which it’s been traumatic in their own lives and how they can find their own way home, because home is available to all of us. It’s just the means of finding the path. We just have to be ready and looking for it.