When your mother signs away her son, what’s left to believe in?
At ten years old, Michael LaFleur’s mother handed a letter to a judge saying she no longer wanted him. Decades later, when she dies alone, that letter is all he finds.
The Cloud Grows Thin traces the long road between those two moments and beyond—from a childhood of military-family chaos and mental illness to the wind-scarred plains where faith finally found him. Moving through institutions, deserts, and churches that failed him, LaFleur discovers a grace that survives human absence.
Told with the haunted honesty of The Glass Castle and the redemptive clarity of Hillbilly Elegy, this is a memoir about abandonment, endurance, and the quiet miracle of belonging. For readers drawn to stories where the storm breaks and the blue begins to show through.
