For fans of Educated and The Sound of Gravel, The Dirt Beneath Our Door tells the remarkable and inspirational story of how a mother escaped a fundamentalist Mormon cult with her eight youngest children, only to struggle with newfound freedom in an America she barely knew.

Pamela Jones had sixty-one siblings, five sister wives, nine children, and one carefully concealed hidden dream: to escape the violent, misogynistic, fundamentalist Mormon cult that kept her perpetually pregnant, broken, and brutalized. Now, in a deeply moving and unflinching memoir, she shares her story for the first time.

Growing up, Pamela was told her only purpose in life was to be her husband’s handmaid and bear him as many children as possible. She endured fear, poverty, abuse, and deprivation as her family constantly moved between rural desert compounds in the US and Mexico, one step ahead of the law and one step ahead of Ervil LeBaron, aka “The Mormon Charles Manson”—the cult’s psychopathic leader whose brutal blood atonements left a trail of bodies in his wake.

Newly married at fifteen, Pamela’s husband forbade her any contact with outsiders, including her own family, and she’d been raised to believe that her throat would be slit and her blood sprinkled on the soil if she ever tried to escape. In 2000, by the age of thirty-four, she knew one thing for certain: if she and her children didn’t escape, they would die. And so they made a desperate escape across the Mexican border with only the clothes on their backs, two vehicles, two tanks of gas, a five-dollar bill, and two credit cards her husband had secretly taken out in her name.

Eventually finding her way to Minnesota, Pamela struggled to support her children with less than a fifth-grade education. But with a mother’s resilience and grit, she built an independent life for herself and her children, all while exploring the life and liberties that had been denied to her for so long. The Dirt Beneath Our Door is an epic and harrowing tale of finding freedom, believing in yourself, and achieving the American Dream.