For years Ricks yearned to escape the poverty and the suffocating brand of Mormon religion that oppressed her at home. Her chance came when she was thirteen and took a trip with her divorced dad, traveling throughout the Midwest, selling tools and hanging around with the men on his shady revolving sales crew. It felt like freedom from her controlling mother and cruel, authoritarian stepfather. But it came with its own disappointments and dysfunctions, and she would soon learn a lesson that would change her life: she can't look to others to save her; she has to save herself.