Bad Catholic: A Memoir

"How could the very thing that felt like my salvation be the exact thing that signaled my mother's ruin?"

In Bad Catholic, Joe Thomas strips away the secrets of a life defined by an unwanted adoption by a predatory stepfather and a mother who retreated into an alcoholic haze to deny the undeniable. It is the raw account of a boy forced to balance the innocence of childhood and the pressures of being a teenager with the "house of horrors" he returned to every night.

From the grit of late-night...