First, they fall

First, they fall is a brutally honest memoir of survival, resilience, transformation, and an at once chaotic family, who thrived in an unconventional and colorful life. When clean, Sierra's creative and nifty stepfather showed his children how to put their brains to use, squeeze pennies and stretch dollars, find beauty in all the ugly, and that any place can be a home, even if it's a boat anchored in the Chesapeake Bay. But when he was on drugs, and drinking, he was unstable and a thief.

Her mother wasn't the nurturing type and thought she'd been cursed by her own mother to have to raise five kids with no money, so she taught her children how to raise themselves and to not rely on any parent. Since they were mixed kids, half-black and half-white, growing up in the south where the swamp roses bloomed, she showed them how to stick up for one another because sissies didn't last, especially colored ones.

Sierra and her four brothers were thrown into a completely new world when their mother began a relationship with someone else after their stepfather was captured by the staties. They referred to him as Lucifer, because he also brought the wicked out of their mother. When he wasn't taking his bipolar medication, he was manic, abusive, racist, and paranoid, fueling it all with beer. When he was on his pills, he was brilliant. He'd teach them how to build motors from scratch, he'd give them history lessons about things you wouldn't learn in the schoolbooks, and he taught them how to live unapologetically.

When the children got older and everything came crumbling down, they moved away from the chaos and rewrote their lives. First, they had to fall to learn how to survive, then all that was left was to fly.