"Lyrical and down-to-earth, wry and heartbreaking, This Life Is in Your Hands is a fascinating and powerful memoir. Melissa Coleman doesn't just tell the story of her family's brave experiment and private tragedy; she brings to life an important and underappreciated chapter of our recent history." -Tom Perrotta 

In a work of power and beauty reminiscent of Tobias Wolff, Jeannette Walls, and Dave Eggers, Melissa Coleman delivers a luminous, evocative childhood memoir exploring the hope and struggle behind her family's search for a sustainable lifestyle. With echoes of The Liars' Club and Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight, Coleman's searing chronicle tells the true story of her upbringing on communes and sustainable farms along the rugged Maine coastline in the 1970's, embedded within a moving, personal quest for truth that her experiences produced.

Beneath the idyllic dream of self-sufficiency lay a family coming undone.

• A Back-to-the-Land Childhood: Raised on sixty rugged acres along the Maine coast without electricity or running water, where days were measured by the seasons and the demands of an off-grid homestead.
• Living in the Shadow of "The Good Life": A true story of growing up next door to the famed homesteaders Helen and Scott Nearing, whose philosophy held both the promise of a simple life and the seeds of conflict.
• A Family Undone: A luminous, unflinching account of a family's dream unraveling, as the pressures of their radical lifestyle fray the bonds between parents and children.
• A Daughter's Search for Truth: A powerful and lyrical exploration of devastating loss and the author's long journey to understand the events that tore her family apart and find a way to live with the past.

A true story, both tragic and redemptive, This Life Is in Your Hands tells of the quest to make a good life, the role of fate, and the power of forgiveness.

In the fall of 1968, Melissa Coleman's parents pack their VW truck and set out to forge a new existence on a rugged coastal homestead. Inspired by Helen and Scott Nearing, authors of the homesteading bible Living the Good Life, Eliot and Sue build their own home by hand, live off the crops they grow, and establish a happy family with Melissa and her two sisters. They also attract national media and become icons of the back-to-the-land farming movement, but the pursuit of a purer, simpler life comes at a price. In the wake of a tragic accident, idealism gives way to human frailty, and by the fall of 1978, Greenwood Farm is abandoned. The search to understand what happened is at the heart of this luminous, heartbreaking, and ultimately redemptive memoir.

"A beautifully rendered memoir about growing up in a unique environment fueled by experimental back-to-the-land living. . . . Coleman illuminates the beauty of growing up in a family culture that valued nature and freedom of expression, but also frankly exposes farming's negative impact on her family.