Author Jeremy White presents The Little Girl at the Bottom of the Picture: A Journey of Selfless Discovery. The tenured cynic's hopeful book details how Jeremy's wife, Edie, discovered her biological family in early 2018, and the beautifully insane, transformational adventure that ensued. After altruistically submitting her DNA, Edie ultimately solves a mystery that had been plaguing an enthusiastic, gangster-adjacent Ukrainian American family for 65 years, but only after she initially learns that her pacifist father is cited in two books for challenging David Duke with a bloody knife at LSU.

The Little Girl Book Podcast promises to deliver moving excerpts from our powerful story about healing, as well as personal insights from the book. We'll also offer peeks behind the scenes at our process of putting it all together, including traveling on COVID's eve to Seattle, Austin, Chicago, and California wine country to meet Edie's far-flung new folks.

Stay tuned for Episode 1, arriving December 1, 2023. Check out LittleGirlBook.com, and follow @littlegirlbook for updates on Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and the platform formerly known as Twitter.

Our story opens in the Baton Rouge home of author Jeremy White and his wife, Edie. He describes her seeing a picture of her biological father for the first time.

Jeremy then reveals to listeners how he walked away from two decades of satire and football officiating to focus on his first book, The Little Girl at the Bottom of the Picture: A Journey of Selfless Discovery. He also explains why, when our story's reluctant hero decided to lead this emotionally daunting adventure, he vowed to be by Edie's side in what would become their beautiful journey.

The opening chapter then tells how the future Marine Corps officer candidate and Naval Reservist met at LSU in 1991. Listeners also learn about Edie's loving adopted family, the O'Neals of Maringouin, Louisiana. Unlike Jeremy's late father-in-law, the town doctor who didn't want his two adopted children learning about their origins, his mother-in-law, Ducky, is ready to break HIPAA standards to help Edie find her birth mother, once she opts to put herself "out there" on AncestryDNA. Jeremy notes the irreversibility of submitting one's DNA—which Edie does solely for the benefit of an unknown woman—and the perils that accompany such a decision, before preparing listeners for "the greatest, most surreal, transformational experience of our lives."

Get your signed edition of The Little Girl at the Bottom of the Picture at LittleGirlBook.com. Follow The Little Girl on social media @littlegirlbook. Subscribe to The Little Girl Book Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

Audio editing and production by Michael Thibodeaux and the Rep Cap team

Edie receives her DNA results in early February 2018, while she and Jeremy were neck-deep in annual preparations to captain a large float in the infamously irreverent Spanish Town Mardi Gras Parade. She initially ignores Ancestry's email, only to be sucker-punched by its iPhone app at work the next day. "John Hart is your father" is seared in her memory. This bombshell, thanks to Ancestry's common-relative feature, separates Edie's paternal matches from those that could help solve the puzzle on her mother's side.

Jeremy also introduces Edie's "other parents," the Wagleys, an otherwise childless couple who always treated her like she was their own daughter. Edie tends to the affairs of Earle Wagley with weekly trips to the ninety-five-year-old widow's Maringouin home. The chapter closes with Edie confounded by two weeks of futilely trying to identify which of the myriad John Harts in the world is her father.

Get your signed edition of The Little Girl at the Bottom of the Picture: A Journey of Selfless Discovery at LittleGirlBook.com. Follow The Little Girl on social media @littlegirlbook. Subscribe to The Little Girl Book Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

Audio editing and production by Michael Thibodeaux and the Rep Cap team

On Saturday, February 17, 2018, Edie reaches out to Beth, a former newspaper copy desk coworker with a master's degree in library science. In the closing hours of what would have been the eighty-fifth birthday of Jeremy's late father-in-law, Doc O'Neal, his youngest daughter and her friend search online for the correct John Hart. Hours after sending a brief message to the mysterious man's Ancestry account, Edie identifies another DNA match, Justin Hart, as her younger paternal half-brother living near Seattle. Edie closes her browser tabs when she and Beth agree to suspend the search at midnight. Beth closes the chapter by instructing Edie to open them back up.

Get your signed edition of The Little Girl at the Bottom of the Picture: A Journey of Selfless Discovery at LittleGirlBook.com. Follow The Little Girl on social media @littlegirlbook. Subscribe to The Little Girl Book Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

Audio editing and production by Michael Thibodeaux and the Rep Cap team

Minutes into Sunday, February 18, 2018, Beth finds Edie's John Hart living six hours west of Baton Rouge in Austin, Texas. That's also where Beth discovers Jeremy's new, much younger sister-in-law, Rachel, with curly red hair just like her big half-sister. Literally overnight, Edie—the baby of the O'Neal family by fourteen years—learns she's the oldest of a new family by a margin of seventeen years.

After daybreak, Edie shares the news with her adopted brother, Patrick, and his wife, Yvette, in Fort Worth. Everyone in the tiny loop begins falling in love with Edie's new family. She sends a message to her new baby brother's Ancestry account that Sunday night. Justin replies just as Edie and Jeremy are dozing off.

Get your signed edition of The Little Girl at the Bottom of the Picture: A Journey of Selfless Discovery at LittleGirlBook.com. Follow The Little Girl on social media @littlegirlbook. Subscribe to The Little Girl Book Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

Audio editing and production by Michael Thibodeaux and the Rep Cap team

On Monday, February 19, 2018, Edie reads the first communication from her newly discovered biological family, sent overnight by her baby brother on the West Coast. "I am excited to meet you and help you figure out more about your family and history," a surprised Justin writes. John, their father, was a politically active Vietnam vet/grad student at LSU when Edie was conceived, explains Justin, who was raised by his mother and stepfather; he visited John growing up. "I see and am in touch with him regularly," Justin mentions, "so I can ask questions for you."

Edie replies that Monday evening with primers about her life and her nascent search for whomever their father hooked up with in Baton Rouge in early 1970. She and Jeremy are already in bed when Justin replies at the stroke of midnight.

Get your signed edition of The Little Girl at the Bottom of the Picture: A Journey of Selfless Discovery at LittleGirlBook.com. Follow The Little Girl on social media @littlegirlbook. Subscribe to The Little Girl Book Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

Audio editing and production by Michael Thibodeaux and the Rep Cap team

At 4:30 a.m. Tuesday, February 20, 2018, Edie learns that John—who happens to be spending time with Justin and his family near Seattle—is equally surprised to find out that he had an older child. While John was happy to talk with his eldest, Justin noted, "His memory isn't always solid due to his age and life history." Edie soon replies with news of "happy tears" in her house, and asks about contacting their little sister, Rachel, who was an adult when she met Justin in 2007. Ducky and her two eldest (biological) children learn about Edie's discoveries.

Justin emails a 2,228-word email that Jeremy dubs the Manifestbro. Amid the myriad, jaw-dropping revelations is news that "Rachel and John do not communicate directly with each other," by her choice. We learn John spent much of the 1970s and '80s in and out of prison; Patrick describes him as "some kind of pot saint." Initially in awe and dumbfounded at how to respond, Edie tells Justin that their exchanges have motivated her to more vigorously explore her maternal Ancestry matches, in the hopes of finding a name that might jog John's memory.

Get your signed edition of The Little Girl at the Bottom of the Picture: A Journey of Selfless Discovery at LittleGirlBook.com. Follow The Little Girl on social media @littlegirlbook. Subscribe to The Little Girl Book Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

Audio editing and production by Michael Thibodeaux and the Rep Cap team

This chapter opens where Chapter 1 does: predawn Wednesday, February 21, 2018, with Edie discovering photos of her paternal family. Justin explains how he helped John with his introductory email to Edie because their father "has a very difficult time typing, organizing his thoughts, and staying on topic." John writes that "the only probable partner" is a woman named Fran Poray, though he's unsure of the surname's spelling. John explains that Fran left Baton Rouge for Paris to wed her fiancé, who then ditched her. An embarrassed Fran returned to the States, and dispatched a friend to ask John if he'd have her back, all while John suffered abuse from local police for his activism.

Edie and Beth unsuccessfully search LSU yearbooks for Fran that Wednesday afternoon. Minutes before midnight, Edie sends her first in-depth message to her birth father.

Get your signed edition of The Little Girl at the Bottom of the Picture: A Journey of Selfless Discovery at LittleGirlBook.com. Follow The Little Girl on social media @littlegirlbook. Subscribe to The Little Girl Book Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts.

Audio editing and production by Michael Thibodeaux and the Rep Cap team