Through the Groves: A Memoir

Anne Hull grew up in rural Central Florida, barefoot half the time and running through the orange groves her father's family had worked for generations.

The ground trembled from the vibrations of bulldozers and jackhammers clearing land for Walt Disney World. 'Look now', her father told her as they rode through the mossy landscape together. 'It will all be gone'. But the real threat was at home, where Hull was pulled between her idealistic but self-destructive father and her mother, a glamorous outsider from Brooklyn struggling with her own aspirations.

All the while, Hull felt the pressures of girlhood closing in.

She dreamed of becoming a traveling salesman who ate in motel coffee shops, accompanied by her baton-twirling babysitter in white boots.

As her sexual identity took shape, Hull knew the place she loved would never love her back and began plotting her escape.