Emilee Hackney was a teenager, two-and-a-half weeks away from marrying an aspiring pastor in rural Appalachia, when police seized the man’s phone, scrolled through his pictures, and arrested him on child pornography charges.

After that shocking episode, Hackney’s life continued to shift in unforeseen ways. She went from making sandwiches at Subway while attending a local community college to starting over at Harvard University as a transfer student. While there, her life devolved into loneliness and dislocation, and she found herself trading sex for money beyond the campus confines.

“I look back now and I think, Oh my gosh, I just got away by the skin of my teeth,” says Hackney, 29, author of “All That’s Unseen,” her newly released first book detailing those experiences, which debuted at #12 on the New York Times combined print and e-book nonfiction bestseller list.

The memoir is an account of escaping religious extremism and redefining herself apart from the mountains that raised her and the elite society to which she fled. Her life’s work became fusing her past as an eighth-generation Appalachian with her future in a broader world.

“Finally,” writes The New York Times Book Review, “we have an Appalachian memoir worthy of its origins.”