The Edge of Her Feathers

A tender and imaginative portrait of a young girl’s coming of age while navigating the multiple challenges of her childhood with her mentally ill mother, this memoir explores the profound effects, across a generation, of decades of cultural silence regarding the issues of mental illness and clergy abuse.

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She dreams of driving across the bridges. She’d never been afraid before; but now, in the dreams, strange, magical happenings unfold. One night, at the Golden Gate, the span carries her underwater, where she discovers long lost friends, all sitting at a beautiful table at the bottom of the Bay; only it was long ago, and everyone is in Victorian dress.

In another dream, the Bridge does not yet exist. Where the beautiful city would appear, there are only sandstone cliffs and desert; and she is just spirit, flying above the water.

But in most of the dreams she is driving. Her eyelids become heavy, she can’t see the road. struggles desperately to keep control of the car, but can feel herself falling, slipping towards the floor, the car breaking over the railing, carrying her with it under the water.


The dreams recur so often that she becomes afraid of heights, of driving over the railing into the waves. Then just as suddenly the dreams stop. Years pass, until the day she hears that he’s jumped, when they return.

In this memoir we accompany the author on her search to unearth the magical and terrifying childhood she has all but buried.