PRE-ORDER: Split the Baby

Split the Baby, by Lauren Rhoades

*PRE-ORDER* Forthcoming Publication Date: June 3, 2025

*Pre-orders receive a copy of Prose Series #24 (also by Lauren) or another of your choice--let us know in the order notes! 

In honest and captivating prose, Split the Baby chronicles the toll of divorce and family rupture from the perspective of a child who was nearly torn in two. Lauren Rhoades retells her experience of growing up caught between two homes run by equally strong women: a fervently Catholic stepmother and a deeply sensitive Jewish mother. Pulled toward radically distinct family cultures with rich but conflicting religious traditions, the young girl struggles to reconcile her stepmother's possessive charm with her mother's fierce and vulnerable love. Working with a trove of salvaged documents—including psychological evaluations, legal records, and personal family diaries—Rhoades searches for answers to questions of identity, spirituality, and the relationships that most deeply shape us. Ultimately, this debut memoir-in-pieces is a thoughtful story of learning to become whole again.

Lauren Rhoades is a writer, editor, and grantmaker living in Jackson, Mississippi. Originally from Denver, Colorado, Lauren has served with AmeriCorps, started Mississippi's first fermentation company, and helmed the Eudora Welty House & Garden. She is now director of grants at the Mississippi Arts Commission and a host of MPB’s The Mississippi Arts Hour. In 2022, Lauren founded Rooted Magazine, an online publication dedicated to telling unfiltered stories about what it means to call Mississippi home. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the Mississippi University for Women. Split the Baby is her first book.

Praise for Split the Baby

"As children, none of us are a match for the world—make that the adults—around us. Lauren Rhoades delivers a clear lyrical account of that truth set in Nineties-era Denver suburbia. Bat-mitzvahed and then recast Catholic, she grew up a girl-sized, court-monitored rope in the post-divorce tug-of-war between her mother and father and stepmother. Due to Rhoades’s sharp little eyes then and ample wisdom now, Split the Baby is engaging, heartbreaking, infuriating, and wry. This memoir makes the reader wonder how any of us arrive to adulthood in one piece. Rhoades can’t say we do. All that’s left is to behold our used parts and the ways they shape our lives and loves ever after. My heart grew a bit before Rhoades was through with me."

—Ellen Ann Fentress, author of The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning

"There is a circularity to Split the Baby as Rhoades explores the threads of a childhood bifurcated by divorce. In beautifully frank prose, she navigates her two homes and the two women she loved: the pain of a mother, a stepmother in competition. Split the Baby is an ethically generous memoir, told with compassion and grace, in which Rhoades shows us what it feels like to inhabit a body divided."

—Mary Miller, author of Biloxi and Always Happy Hour

"Startlingly beautiful prose, effortlessly rendered, and never pretentious, Split the Baby is the most evocative and moving memoir I've ever read about childhood, marriage, and divorce. I cannot imagine a more therapeutic book for disintegrating families to read together. Lauren Rhoades has written a unique classic that will bring great solace to kids caught between bedrooms that often reflect the needs of the parent more than the child. Read this book and you will be giving it away as a gift forever." 

—Lee Durkee, author of Stalking Shakespeare and
The Last Taxi Driver

Details:

• Trim size: 5.5" x 8.5"
• Publication date: June 3, 2025
• ISBN: 978-1-960215-36-9