How does Hick describe her childhood in the novel, White Houses?

Hick relates the events of her childhood to Eleanor shortly after they first meet while taking a train trip to Missy LeHand's mother's funeral. She grew up in Bowdle, South Dakota, and talks about being raped by her father, her mother's slow, agonizing death after a stroke, and being sent off to work as a maid when she was thirteen-years-old. Hick refers to the landscape of Bowdle as "flat, treeless misery" (31), and notes the discriminatory biases of the people there, as no one else would agree to work for the O'Neill family because they were Irish Catholic.