Memoir Mentors

We’re honored to welcome Pamela Jones and Elizabeth Ridley for a special Q&A about The Dirt Beneath Our Door. This memoir, co-written after Pamela’s escape from a fundamentalist Mormon cult, offers rare insight into collaborative storytelling. We’ll talk about how the book took shape, what it was like to craft such a personal story together, and the craft choices that shaped the final manuscript. Come with your questions—or just come to listen and be inspired.

Join us on March 19 for the Book Club: https://www.meetup.com/memoir-mentors/events/311340254/

About the book:
Pamela Jones had sixty-one siblings, five sister wives, nine children, and one carefully hidden dream: to escape the violent, fundamentalist Mormon cult that had kept her perpetually pregnant, broken, and brutalized for 34 years. With a daring escape, she gained her freedom, but with less than a fifth-grade education and 9 mouths to feed, her journey had just begun. A remarkable and inspirational true story, this book is not only a testament to a mother's resilience and grit, but an epic and harrowing tale of finding freedom, believing in yourself, and achieving your dreams.

About Pamela:
Pamela Jones was born in 1965 in Los Molinos, Mexico, into a polygamous Mormon cult known as The Church of the Firstborn of the Fullness of Time. Facing isolation and scarce resources forged her resilience and determination, leading Pamela to a remarkable journey of survival and self-discovery. After seventeen pregnancies and nine children, in 2000 at age thirty-four, Pamela, along with her children, escaped to the United States, eventually established her own cleaning company now known as Exclusive Services by My Girls which she has grown into a thriving enterprise employing more than forty-five people. Pamela lives outside Minneapolis with her sweetheart, Rick, close to her nine children and thirty grandchildren. The Dirt Beneath Our Door is her first book.

About Elizabeth:
Elizabeth Ridley is the author of five novels, most recently Searching for Celia, and coauthor of four memoirs, including Waging the War Within, Incredibull Stella, and Saving Sadie. A two-time writing fellowship recipient, she has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University and a master’s degree in creative writing from The University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, where she studied under former British Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion.