My Brave Little Man: A trauma filled childhood memoir

In this trauma-filled childhood memoir, Terry takes you back in time to the years he spent in an orphanage--where conflicts between boys were solved in the basement with boxing gloves.

This is a true story that had to be told: It is the clear, unique voice of a survivor of the kind of childhood that is usually the undoing of less hardy souls. With novelist flair and impressive detail, Terry chronicles his first eight years in a rarely visited slice of the country.

In 1950, a doctor in Duluth, Minnesota, wrote in his medical file that a four-year-old boy had been admitted to St. Mary's hospital as a "rather severe behavior problem." "This is," the doctor notes, "a broken home, and the mother-child relationship is not good."

That boy is Terry. He had been shuffled from one nesting arrangement to another for all of his short life. First, he lived with his grandparents on their rustic farmstead in northern Minnesota, then with his intellectually disabled mother and a mostly absent alcoholic father, and finally with a boorish relative.

In spite of this, Terry had been relatively happy. The real problems started when his mother dropped him and his two younger siblings off at an orphanage. A week later, at Terry's urging, the children ran away to find their mother, and Terry ended up in a straight jacket. Thus, began Terry's journey of triumph over multiple misfortunes.

Eight years later, while lying on the banks of a river on his adoptive parents' farm, Terry promised God he would do eight things during his lifetime. The My Brave Little Man memoir series is one of those eight.

The series continues in Book II: The Weight of the World.