Meet the Author
Kate Gale
In this provocative memoir, award-winning publisher Kate Gale shares the harrowing story of her upbringing in an “intentional community”—a religious cult in which she faced abusive living conditions until her escape at age eighteen.
When Kate Gale was four years old, her mother gave her to an “intentional community” in rural New Hampshire, where a group of three hundred people built unseaworthy boats to ride out the Rapture. She would spend the next fourteen years of her life there, trapped amongst monsters and followers, where the kids were often starved, beaten, and forced to do “joy jobs” instead of schoolwork. While Kate mimicked the religiosity of those around her to earn each meal, she secretly stashed away books from the confiscated belongings of new members. Reading became her salvation and her only link to the outside world—creating a haven for herself within her own mind. That was enough to spark a dream in Kate of life beyond the confines of the cult.
Told through visceral flashes and shards of memory, Little Soldiers recounts Gale’s journey from her earliest memories at the Farm to building her own publishing company—breaking free from the tethers of her past and creating possibilities for other writers. Through deeply emotional and intimate recollections, Gale sheds light on the trauma, abuse, and censorship she faced, as well as her journey to assimilate into modern society in her early twenties. With crackling wit and stunning prose, this is her story of survival, escape and, ultimately, forging herself anew through literature.
When Kate Gale was four years old, her mother gave her to an “intentional community” in rural New Hampshire, where a group of three hundred people built unseaworthy boats to ride out the Rapture. She would spend the next fourteen years of her life there, trapped amongst monsters and followers, where the kids were often starved, beaten, and forced to do “joy jobs” instead of schoolwork. While Kate mimicked the religiosity of those around her to earn each meal, she secretly stashed away books from the confiscated belongings of new members. Reading became her salvation and her only link to the outside world—creating a haven for herself within her own mind. That was enough to spark a dream in Kate of life beyond the confines of the cult.
Told through visceral flashes and shards of memory, Little Soldiers recounts Gale’s journey from her earliest memories at the Farm to building her own publishing company—breaking free from the tethers of her past and creating possibilities for other writers. Through deeply emotional and intimate recollections, Gale sheds light on the trauma, abuse, and censorship she faced, as well as her journey to assimilate into modern society in her early twenties. With crackling wit and stunning prose, this is her story of survival, escape and, ultimately, forging herself anew through literature.
Praise for Little Soldiers
“Kate Gale’s Little Soldiers is a story of defying odds and systems. It is an honest story, a true story, a war story, and a horror story, all told against the backdrop of art in our culture. Gale’s prose is economical, precise, and never ordinary, never predictable.”
-
“A haunting, darkly illuminating memoir about the stories we’re taught to believe, the language that keeps us trapped, and the books that might just set us free. In Little Soldiers, Kate Gale writes with the kind of emotional precision that makes this devastatingly relevant story hard to put down and impossible to shake.”
Amanda Montell, New York Times bestselling author of Cultish -
“Kate Gale is unlike you and me. You feel it to meet her, a strength and a mysterious wildness underlying the erudite cosmopolitan publisher. Reading her suspenseful memoir, Little Soldiers, I now understand why—watching her grow up in a harsh Christian cult in rural New Hampshire, which she leaves at eighteen to head, unarmed, into the world. Here’s to women who dream themselves into being, who nourish what the poet Pushkin called ‘inner freedom.’ I could not put this book down, you won’t either.”
Janet Fitch, bestselling author of White Oleander
About the Imprint
Gorgeous, big-hearted, and thought-provoking stories—acquired and championed by Sarah Jessica Parker herself. All curated with the passion of a lifelong reader turned publisher.
