A Piece of Cake

My daughter bought me this for my birthday. She had read the back of it at the bookstore, and “thought I would find it interesting.”

It was riveting. It’s actually a fairly nondescript story of abuse, but it’s intense. The author is currently an attorney in San Francisco. The book begins with her mother’s death when she was 11, which begins a trip through the California foster care system. She becomes an alcohol- and drug-addicted child prostitute and things go downhill (!) from there.

Until she finally gets clean in her 20s, the author is a trainwreck of addiction. She talks of a world where she spent weeks or months high or drunk and goes years without being sober for a single full day. Given the things she did, I can’t believe she’s still alive.

In the depths of her addiction, she finally finds a way out in Alcoholics Anonymous. She talks of her path to sobriety and of the people who got her there. She was helped along the way by a series of people who let her know that they weren’t prepared to give up.

The story is both heartbreaking and redemptive. It isn’t overtly spiritual – and that’s not its main point – but it does talk of God, and the author credits Him for her eventual recovery.