After Trump’s 2016 election, a woman starts a regenerative farm in the Appalachian Mountains—an act of resistance against environmental collapse. But when her engagement unravels under the weight of undiagnosed bipolar disorder and generational trauma, the solitude meant to fuel her activism becomes a crucible for everything she’s spent years avoiding. A DNA test revealing biological siblings sends her deep into the mountain hollers, chasing family secrets and long-lost kin. What she finds is Georgina Mae—her birth mother—whose struggles with addiction and survival echo her own. As she pieces together the past, she must confront the truth: some reunions carry a cost, and some answers are buried with those no longer here to give them.
Interwoven with myth and memory, Uprooted is a lyrical mediation on family, identity, inherited trauma, and the strength it takes to grow something new from broken ground. Uprooted was shortlisted for the prestigious Bridport Prize.
Praise for Uprooted
“I’ve long marveled at S.B. Long’s unsurpassed gift for narrative, brilliantly displayed in her extraordinary new memoir, Uprooted, a tale as powerfully and imaginatively rendered as the very best fiction. Harrowing, heartbreaking, unimaginably candid, often outrageous, and ultimately triumphant, Uprooted does not relax its spell and frisson until its final remarkable sentence. This is a courageous, necessary book by a master storyteller.”
—Joseph Bathanti, North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-2014) and author of Too Glorious to Even Long for on Certain Days
“Everything comes from the earth; everything returns to it. In Uprooted, her gorgeous and unflinching memoir of adoption, identity, and healing, Sarah Beth Long digs to reclaim the past all the while tending the soil out of which a new self might emerge. Against the backdrop of sustainable farming in North Carolina and a newly discovered birth family in rural Tennessee, Long weaves a raw, lyrical journey through trauma, resilience, and the search for belonging. Uprooted is a story of fierce honesty and mythic resonance, and, above all else, a story of transformation.”
—Mark Powell, author of The Late Rebellion
“Uprooted is a compelling meditation on families—those we are born into, those that choose us, and those we create ourselves. With fierce honesty, this memoir investigates complex and even contradictory relationships between mothers and daughters. Beautiful and heartbreaking by turns, S. B. Long invites readers to experience her loss and longing, and ultimately the joy of finding a place and people to call her own.”
—Zackary Vernon, author of Our Bodies Electric
