Love Song of the Dandelion Mama

I was poor. I was divorced. I was a single mother. I was a welfare mother. I was heading back to college in my thirties. I was learning to love and accept myself for the first time. I was helping my children heal and grow after the trauma of losing their father. Everything I had feared, every stigma I had hoped to avoid, had become part of my life. In the prevailing narrative distilled down, my ex-husband was a drug addict, and I was an uneducated single mother on welfare.

So what? What are you going to do about it?

I’m going to reject the pre-written script and write my own story from here on out. All of it. I’m going to own it —The Burning Point, p. 168

By Common Consent Press is proud to announce the publication of our second book, Tracy McKay’s long-awaited memoir, The Burning Point: A Memoir of Addiction, Destruction, Love, Parenting, Survival, and Hope. The book is now available on Amazon and our online store—and the Kindle version will become available at midnight tonight (though it can be pre-ordered at any time). One way or another, you need to read this. It is the sort of book that changes lives.

Many in the Mormon Internet world will be familiar with at least some of Tracy’s story, elements of which appeared in BCC posts and in Tracy’s popular blog, Dandelion Mama. As it happens, the Mormon Internet—the Bloggernacle—has a role in the last reel. After the events narrated in the book, a scholarship from the Feminist Mormon Housewives blog enabled her to complete her degree. The Tracy McKay Scholarship for Single Mormon Mothers is now an annual award, and it is a beautiful example of how a virtual reality can become a real community.

But this book is no more about the Tracy McKay scholarship than Moby Dick is a story about a fish. The Burning Point is a marvelous and miraculous book. Tracy weaves together the compelling story of her husband David’s struggle with addiction, their divorce, her years as a single mother of three on welfare, her success running a small business from her home, her experiences raising a child with autism, and her experiences as a new convert in two remarkably supportive communities of Latter-day Saints—her ward and the Bloggernacle.

But wait. There’s more. Through flashbacks, Tracy tells the equally compelling story of her long courtship with David, their marriage, her religious conversion, and their family’s struggles with the addiction that ultimately took his life. These are powerful stories offered without a drop of resentment or bitterness. This is not a narrative exercise in score settling, but in love and grace and redemption.

And, as readers of BCC and Dandelion Mama know, Tracy can write. Boy can she write. And she writes her heart out in The Burning Point. Every sentence is a carefully wrought work of art, every story is a profound and thought-provoking piece of prose. I am not exaggerating. You can see for yourself by reading the first chapter here.

This is a remarkable book. I don’t say this because I am affiliated with the BCC Press. Rather, I affiliated with the BCC Press because I wanted to produce books like this. And, for this week only, BCC readers can receive a 20% discount on The Burning Point in the the BCC Store by using the discount code G6PBWYKC.

Read it. It is as good as books get.