Author Blaine Paxton Hall, eldest
grandchild of a three-term
State Representative and prominent, lifelong Methodist minister,
was made a Ward of the State at age two.
Hall is the eldest of four children born to severely abusive
and
mentally ill parents. Hall's parents — his father was also a
Methodist minister — abandoned him in a Children's Home
where he stayed through high school graduation.
Hall leads us on his lifelong inner and outer search for home,
which includes living in Chicago, impoverished and in terror of his
parents, and later in the historic Woodstock Children's Home
where he stayed in a building once part of the earlier Todd School
for Boys — its most famous resident was Orson Welles.
The odyssey of Hall's life unfolds by flashbacks of memories
evoked during a road trip he took back to the Children's Home
thirty years later. He documents the historic Woodstock
Children's Home; he reveals his past struggles to get his
undergraduate and Physician Assistant medical education, his
battles to free himself of his inner demons, and the liberation of
his soul by undergoing female to male gender reassignment.
At age fifty, Hall had never owned his own home, and his
parents
never owned a home either. Now finally able to pursue the
American dream, at age 57 Hall has bought a home for
himself, which he sees as the outer manifestation of his inner
completion. He calls it Hestia's House, after the Greek
goddess of the hearth; and as he has said, "If I write this, it
will come."