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There are shelves of memoirs about overcoming the death of a parent, childhood abuse, rape, drug addiction, miscarriage, alcoholism, hustling, gangbanging, near-death injuries, drug dealing, prostitution, or homelessness. Cupcake Brown survived all these
Crown
February 2006
480 pages ISBN: 1400052289 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Memoir
You have in your hands the strange, heart-wrenching, and
exhilarating tale of a woman named Cupcake. It begins as the
story of a girl orphaned twice over, once by the death of
her mother and then again by a child welfare system that
separated her from her stepfather and put her into the hands
of an epically sadistic foster parent. But there comes a
point in her preteen years--maybe it's the night she first
tries to run away and is exposed to drugs, alcohol, and sex
all at once--when Cupcake's story shifts from a tear-jerking
tragedy to a dark comic blues opera. As Cupcake's troubles
grow, so do her voice and spirit. Her gut-punch sense of
humor and eye for the absurd, along with her outsized will,
carry her through a fateful series of events that could
easily have left her dead.
Young Cupcake learned to
survive by turning tricks, downing hard liquor, partying
like a rock star, and ingesting every drug she could find
while hitchhiking up and down the California coast. She
stumbled into gangbanging, drug dealing, hustling,
prostitution, theft, and, eventually, the best scam of all:
a series of 9-to-5 jobs. But Cupcake's unlikely tour through
the cubicle world was paralleled by a quickening descent
into the nightmare of crack cocaine use, till she eventually
found herself living behind a Dumpster.
Astonishingly, she turned it around. With the help
of a cobbled together family of eccentric fellow addicts and
"angels"--a series of friends and strangers who came to her
aid at pivotal moments--she slowly transformed her life from
the inside out.
A Piece of Cake is unlike
any memoir you'll ever read. Moving and almost transgressive
in its frankness, it is a relentlessly gripping tale of a
resilient spirit who took on the worst of contemporary
urban life and survived it with a furious wit and unyielding
determination. Cupcake Brown is a dynamic and utterly
original storyteller who will guide you on the most
satisfying, startlingly funny, and genuinely affecting tour
through hell you'll ever take.
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