No Way Out but Through

Two women of different generations—one scarred by an abusive teen marriage and the other by an alcoholic husband—come together to grapple with their inner demons and confront their untold stories.

When author Shannon Irwin meets Grace Ferrall and agrees to interview the younger woman and tell the story of Grace’s forced child marriage and harrowing youth, these very different women begin an unlikely relationship. Grace’s ordeal starts in Louisiana, with an alcoholic father and a mother whose mood swings are often intolerable. When Grace is barely fifteen and living in Oklahoma, her mother manipulates her into marrying Rafe, a scurrilous, older man. Pregnant at sixteen, Grace is soon living in a truck near a river in Oregon with Rafe’s cult-like family.

After years of abuse and multiple pregnancies and miscarriages, with the help of an unlikely ally, Grace escapes. But her newfound freedom is fragile, and she is forced to make impossible choices to protect herself and her two daughters. Trust builds between the women as Grace shares details she has never told anyone, while Shannon, with a daughter Grace’s age, and ridden with guilt about her former marriage, reveals the dysfunction in her own life and the remorse she suffers.

A searing and compassionate exploration set in present-day Pawleys Island, South Carolina, and 1990s rural Oklahoma, No Way Out but Through is inspired by the real life of an ordinary woman who survived extraordinary circumstances.