Meet the Author
My name is Jesse René Gibbs and I am the author of Girl Hidden. I am an artist, designer, dancer and survivor.
I am a stepmother to four, Amma to four more and blessed beyond measure with the family that I chose.
Girl Hidden is based on the true story of my life, gleaned from years of my mother’s writings, my grandmother’s journals and my own experiences. I did my best to showcase the depth of damage that growing up with a narcissistic parent can have on a person, and how hard it is to come to terms with the amount of gaslighting that comes with that life. My siblings all have their own stories of being played against each other, bullied and even emotionally tortured by our parents. We were trained to not trust our own intuition, raised in a life of poverty, a lack of privacy and the endlessly traumatizing purity culture.
I was hunted in my own home by the man my mother married and escaped at nineteen only to land in an intentional community in Chicago that did nearly as much damage. My best friend in the book is also real, and she did more to walk me through my trauma, and she is the main reason that these stories were finally published.
My new life in Seattle didn’t start until well into my thirties, and I’m still working on deconstructing my life up to that point. I wrote this book to organize my life in my own mind and to undo years of lies. I also wrote it because others need to know that they are not alone.
—
At the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains sits the small farm towns of Rockwell, Sugar Loaf and Liledoun, North Carolina. A large family struggles to survive the chaotic nature of the familyhead: their mother, a terrifying blend of rage, disappointment and religious command. Her husband follows sheepishly behind, a monster of his own kind.
And then there’s young Jesse; unwanted from conception but kept as a pawn for her mother’s bidding. Her life is a tale of growing up with no one to count on but herself.
A story of southern hills, a mother’s neglect, kidnapping, fireflies, birth, death and the taste of sweet mulberries ripened by the sun. Jesse is a girl hidden who becomes a woman discovered.
