A Good Place to Live Synopsis

Delores “Deedee” Swigert grew up in rural Missouri during the 1950s and 1960s, an era marked by significant race and gender inequality. Her mixed-race parents are musicians managing to assimilate by entertaining the local community.

Her mother encourages ambition and breaking free of constraints, while her father attempts to repress her curiosity and deny her Mexican heritage. The complex characters within her family and hometown shape her self-understanding and create a strong desire to thrive. 

Told through the voice of young Deedee, as she encounters and pushes through adversity, some paragraphs will make you weep, and others will make you laugh out loud. In the aftermath of her family's disintegration, she is required to raise herself, overcoming food insecurity, child abuse, marginalized education, inadequate healthcare, and teen pregnancy, evolving from a young girl into a woman.

She challenges small-town conventions about female sexuality throughout her precocious sexual development, daring to think differently. Loss and suffering as a result of an unplanned pregnancy test her will to survive. She makes you love the good people who supported her and challenges you to understand those who increased her suffering.

Her ability to envision a broader future led to an international career among the fashion world's elite.  Her adoption reform activism puts her at odds with a conservative justice on the US Supreme Court.

Her story reflects the modern-day struggles of all women who yearn for freedom in a patriarchal society. "A Good Place to Live" is told with humor, frankness, vulnerability, and rich historical detail, accompanied by the musical backdrop of the times. She chronicles a life marked by courage, optimism, perseverance, and emotional resilience.

Delores (Teller) Sullivan has worked in the fashion industry as a model, model agent, and model scout for Ford Models New York. She is the former President of the American Adoption Congress in Washington, D.C., a nonprofit organization dedicated to adoption education and legislative advocacy. Her life story and adoption reform activism were featured in Rolling Stone Magazine. She holds a master’s degree in clinical social work and is a psychotherapist. She is married to author Randall Sullivan, whom she met when he interviewed her for Rolling Stone. They live on the Oregon Coast.