For years, the only evidence Kate Price had of being exploited as a child came from bodily pain, unexplained grief, and chilling snippets of memories: the sting of a needle interrupting her sleep, bare lightbulbs, strange men, little girls in lingerie. With the help of famed psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk—who included her story as an anonymous case study in his bestseller The Body Keeps the Score—she uncovered the devastating truth of her father’s sexual abuse, memories she verified through a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist investigation. In this unflinching and empowering memoir, Price tells her own story for the first time—and survival is just the beginning. Through education and relentless resilience, Price became a world-renowned scholar of childhood sexual abuse, identifying the systemic failures that allowed for her abuse and protecting other vulnerable children from the same fate.
While Price’s story is harrowing, the memoir is unexpectedly uplifting; this is not simply the story of what happened to Kate Price nor even why it happened. It is the story of what happened next: how Price learned to face her trauma head-on, and how full and fearless life can be on the other side. A triumph.—C.B.