Chosen: How Opening My Home Healed My Heart

In the tradition of The Glass Castle, a poignant, inspirational memoir of a lonely girl who survived decades of harrowing abuse at home to open her heart and redefine what it is to be a family and a mom.

No child should grow up like Sandi Smith. At age three, she was locked in a closet. By age eight, she was behind the wheel of a car, and by age nine, she was forced to hunt deer for food. She was bartered as a child laborer to pick pinto beans and forced to clean motel rooms by her beautiful, schizophrenic mother and perpetually angry, inventor father. For six months, she lived alone in a trailer, stealing from the local grocery store to eat.

In the rich tradition of The Glass Castle and Educated, Sandi recounts her heart-stopping, nomadic upbringing amid the mountains of Utah, flat farmlands of Idaho, and California sprawl, as her father's schemes and scams repeatedly failed. She escaped to college as a basketball player and worked her way through law school, rising to head of litigation for Apple and raising two children. Having built a conventional life, she never expected to re-examine the pain of her survivalist past.

A sudden move east and a chance encounter inside the parking garage at the tony, elite Sidwell Friends School forever changed Sandi's life. She intersected with three young Black men, all football players at Sidwell, on scholarship. Sandi and her family open their home to these young men, and gradually, they share their own stories of hurt and survival with the woman they call "Momma."

Fearlessly facing the challenges of race, class, prejudice, addiction, and abandonment, Chosen shows us how one determined mother built a family of her choosing and recovered the affirming healing power of love.

Author: Sandra Ellen Smith
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 08/11/2026
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.10lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.20w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9781982198251

About the Author
Sandra Ellen Smith (Sandi) was born in California and grew up across the West. Her harrowing, nomadic childhood included living in a shack without electricity or running water. She put herself through college at University of California Los Angeles and law school at University of Southern California, becoming the director of litigation for Apple Computer in 1998. She raised two biological children and, after moving to the Washington, DC, suburbs, opened her home and her heart to eight more. While in the DC area, she spent years representing domestic abuse survivors and their children, including as a Guardian Ad Litem in the DC Superior Court. She has also been actively involved on the boards of multiple academic, public, and nonprofit institutions. Today, Sandi lives in rural Colorado with her two dogs, Twelve and Thor. She is an attorney in private practice and president of her regional fire board. Her large, loving family visits her often.