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