Annals of Addiction and Recovery, Chapter Umpteen-- A Piece of Cake (476 hits)
On the first page of her calamity-packed addiction memoir, Cupcake Brown ---yes CUPCAKE is her REAL name---explains how the name Cupcake wound up on her birth certificate. For some people, being named Cupcake by a mother still woozy from childbirth might rank as life's most delirious moment.
Cupcake Brown, at eleven years old, found her mother dead. Within weeks she was taken from her beloved step-father, who had no legal claim to her. She was given to the biological father who'd never paid a cent of child-support, whom she had never so much as met (and whom she refers to, when she's feeling charitable, as "the sperm donor").
He immediately placed her and her brother in foster care with a sadistic clean freak who barely fed them and introduced them to her house with a beating. She never so much as saw the inside of the sperm donor's house. In foster care, within days she was introduced to alcohol, marijuana and raped. She became a runaway and turned her first trick, all before the age of twelve. In short order she began consuming hard drugs. Her favorite? Whatever was free.
Her prose doesn't court sympathy. If anything, she dwells more on the damage she did to herself through substance abuse than on the physical and s*xual abuse visited upon her as a child. ...As a personal story this book is remarkable, despite falling into the survivor-of-childhood-horror genre, which seems to have a limited audience with an unlimited appetite for other people's woe.
A Piece of Cake is ultimately an inspiring story. There are few people who live through such crushing adversity and make it all the way out of substance abuse to earn a law degree. Cupcake Brown has truly been there and through that. I had the chance to hear the author give a reading of this book, and I can tell you that it's very hard indeed to square the polished appearance of this educated, well-groomed professional woman with the story of a desperate crack whore. But when Cupcake Brown opens her mouth and speaks, there's no doubt she's lived every one of the days recounted in her memoir, even the ones she can't remember.
