Prodigals: A Sister's Memoir of Appalachia and Loss

Prodigals, a memoir inessays, explores the life of Sarah Beth Childers’swildly creative brother, who committed suicide at twenty—two, and her life with him and after him, through the lens of the Biblical parable of the Prodigal Son.

This book examines the ways Childers’s brother’s story was both universal and uniquely Appalachian. While the archetype of the prodigal son carries all its assumed baggage, the Appalachian setting of Prodigals brings its own influences.Childers foregrounds the A...