Heart Sick

Chelsea Snow Cain was born February 5, 1972 in Iowa City, Iowa, to Mary Cain and Larry Schmidt.Cain spent her early childhood on a hippie commune outside of Iowa City. Her father resisted the Vietnam draft and her parents lived underground for several years. In 1978, she moved with her mother to Bellingham, Washington, where she attended Lowell Elementary School, Fairhaven Middle School and Sehome High School.[2] She spent the school year in Bellingham with her mother and the summers in Florida with her father and stepmother and stepbrother. Cain left Bellingham after high school to study political science at the University of California at Irvine, where she wrote for the New University newspaper and became the opinion editor. After graduating in 1994, she attended the graduate school of journalism at the University of Iowa. While at Iowa, she wrote a weekly column for The Daily Iowan.[3] Her master's thesis at the University of Iowa became Dharma Girl, a memoir about Cain's early childhood on the hippie commune. One of her professors presented it to several editors for review, and Seal Press picked it up as Cain's first published work. She was 24 years old.[