Currently seeking agent representation or a publisher for:

No Finer Place

a memoir

by Michelle Tullier

No Finer Place addresses the universal human need for connection and belonging in order to know oneself. It is about making sense of family and family secrets. It is about the struggle to find compassion and forgiveness for those who did their best to love us when their best wasn’t good enough.

We are wired for connection.

Neuroscientists found mirror neurons in our brains that serve no other purpose than to make empathic connections. Aristotle proclaimed that humans cannot live in isolation, and that if they do, they are either “beast or god.” We find our sense of connection in all sorts of ways—circles of friends, shared ethnicity, religious faiths or places of worship, work colleagues, even rooting for the same sports team. But our most primal source of connection and sense of belonging comes from family.

What happens when someone comes from a family divided, not fully belonging to one set of parents, one heritage, one set of roots?

This is what the author experiences when she takes a home DNA test just for fun.

Her world and identity rocked by the DNA results surprise, the author embarks on a quest to figure out herself by figuring out her found family and new lineage. No Finer Place takes readers back to the Sturm und Drang of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Germany in the 1700s and to the Low Country of South Carolina and spirits of Savannah where clues to Michelle’s found family drip in tangles like Spanish moss from live oaks.

Though welcomed by the living members of her new family, Michelle realizes she will never fully belong with them. Making up for lost time is a quaint idea but not really attainable. She begins to find herself drawn to wanting to understand the now-deceased father who raised her and to explore his heritage, which she has always claimed as her own but now cannot rightfully own, given the lack of genetic connection. Or can she?

Michelle travels from the bayous to the Bible Belt of Louisiana, tracing her raising father’s coming-of-age against a backdrop of the Great Depression, WWII, racial segregation, and homophobia.

Romeo and Juliet meets Duck Dynasty

Born shotgun-style in 1932 to a dashing but ne’er-do-well, fifth-generation, Catholic, Cajun father in Baton Rouge of French Norman and Acadian descent, and an industrious, Southern Baptist mother of Anglo-Saxon descent from West Monroe in the north of the state, Michelle’s raising father J. Scott Tullier led a life divided from the get-go. After all, his young parents’ ancestors had been fighting for a thousand years. He went on to experience a Mayberry-esque childhood in small Louisiana towns, “raised by Bette Davis and Cary Grant,” as he often said, since his divorceé mother eked out a living to support herself and her son by working in the picture show.

Little Scotty was precocious and a self-described “sissy boy,” too big for the small ponds in which he was reared. He escaped to the bright downtown lights of the city for dental school and carved out a life there with his new bride, formerly his high school sweetheart. That bride, the author’s mother, came from slightly less humble roots in West Monroe, the daughter of furniture manufacturers who were financially comfortable but provincial and unsophisticated. Pat studied Town and Country magazine like an eleventh grader prepping for the SATs and was able to steer herself, Scott, and their daughter through the fox hunts, horse shows, ballets, and balls of Old Money, blueblood circles in their city life.

Living between worlds, never fully belonging to either, continued as a theme throughout J. Scott’s adult life. Though smart and charming, that small-town boy now grown up was no longer the biggest fish in the pond. Confounding matters was a secret Scott kept closely guarded in his professional arena and his wife’s rarified circles. Though he delighted all who knew him, and though he delighted in warm friendships and a loving relationship with his daughter, J. Scott lived a disconnected life without true intimacy, a life in the closet.

Finding synthesis

After a few years of one step forward and two steps back into the worlds and lives of her new biological family, and two steps forward and one step back into the lives of her “raising family,” the author grapples with life in the murky middle, like being stuck in the Borderlands of Greek mythology.

In Atlas of the Heart (Random House, 2021, p. 156), Brené Brown says that:

True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness.

No Finer Place reveals the gift one can find in the middle, the gift of being a liminal being who can flourish alone without being lonely. The author takes a surprising route to find her way to that self-belonging, to her finer place. Her journey is a deeply personal one, with its unique twists brought by the cast of characters from whom she springs and their secrets and lies, but that journey is relatable, and perhaps inspirational, for anyone struggling to know themselves, to know connection, and to know love.