As suggested by the title of her first book, "Trespassers Will Be Baptized: The Unordained Memoir of a Preacher's Daughter," attorney Elizabeth Emerson Hancock's story is not a hair-raising account of barely surviving a gothic fundamentalist childhood.

Instead, her wry humor creates sentences like this one, about her younger sister, Meg: "She walked her feet up the wall and picked her nose -- the yogi-style meditative pose of the Christian child of the South."

The author describes her father, Greg Hancock, as a soft-spoken Southern Baptist pastor who reveres Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and sings that quartet's "Teach Your Children" to her during one poignant moment.

In the book's acknowledgments, Hancock, 30, thanks a high school English teacher for inspiring her to write the memoir. She did not begin working on it in earnest, however, until September 2001. After finishing her undergraduate studies at Harvard University, she was living in Boston when the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks occurred. Because of jammed phone lines and her distance from her childhood home in Kentucky, she felt terribly alone.

She began looking through her journals and remembering her family.

"There in the quiet downtown, in the vacated streets, I began to write about my family," she said this week. "It was a need to reconnect with what was familiar when nothing around me was."

. . .

Hancock's agent is Byrd Leavell, a native of Charlottesville and a graduate of the University of Virginia who works for the Waxman Literary Agency in New York. Leavell says he learned of Hancock through his client Tucker Max, author of "I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell."

"She's one of the most talented writers to come across my desk," Leavell said, adding that he thinks a bright writing career awaits Hancock. "I'm always looking for someone whose prose jumps off the page. Hers always does that."

Hancock, whose legal name is Elizabeth E. Trende, is an attorney with Hunton & Williams in Richmond. She said her memoir has prompted fan mail from older conservative Christian women, who believe they recognize personality types from their years of involvement in churches, and from younger women who see feminist themes in her narrative. (Hancock depicts her younger sister as having such a gift for preaching that she would line up her stuffed animals as a makeshift congregation. Meg is now a college administrator.)

She loves hearing from former churchgoers who enjoy the sort of memories she writes about -- visits with grandparents, church suppers, awkward skits about biblical characters, first experiences with music.

"It's easier to believe when you're a child. Church is a good place for learning how to believe in something you can't see," she said. "I long for the time when I thought my parents were Godlike, or that my church could fix anything."

Her churchgoing is not merely a distant memory, however. Hancock and her husband, Sean Trende, joined First Baptist Church on Monument Avenue about a year ago.

Hancock grew up in another Richmond -- home of Eastern Kentucky University -- and moved here when she and her husband took jobs with Hunton & Williams.

I've lived here about two or three years now, which I've learned is a millisecond in Richmond time," she says. She refers to her adopted home as "a big city that thinks it's a small town."

Book signing

Elizabeth Emerson Hancock will be signing copies of her book today from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Barnes & Noble shop at The Creeks at Virginia Center, 9850 Brook Road in Glen Allen.