10/31/2022
With disarming frankness, Summers invites readers in to a life that has often been unsettled, recounting her experiences facing addiction, abuse, grief, and incarceration—and also her celebrated work, in later years, for nonprofits and charities aiding the unhoused of West Hollywood and Los Angeles. Summers’ sometimes harrowing story opens with her post-war childhood, in Pennsylvania and then Orlando, Florida, raised by a mother who suffered serial sexual abuse as a child. Summers, too, endured rape at age 15 and a pregnancy a few years later, during which she was interred in a home for unwed mothers-to-be. “The emotional pain of giving up my child had come to me,” she writes, of the months afterwards. “It entered my body through my heart and never left me.”
In the years after, an unrooted Summers got caught up in prostitution, vice busts, and a deepening despair: “Prostitution rips out the soul,” she writes, with her usual clear-eyed power. “It eats into the guts, the essence of who we are, and feeds on the hatred and disgust already there.” The fresh start of a move to Los Angeles and work in the then-new antiques industry—and the forming of her own customhouse brokerage business—eventually sputters as she develops addictions to speed and then meth. Imprisonment for theft and bad checks follows, as Summers endeavors to get her life back on track.
That she does, in the face of great personal tragedy, is a testament to the same spirit and resilience that never allows this book to become too dark. Summers’ storytelling is crisp and vivid, honest about her choices, and distinguished by extraordinary care for others, including strangers in need but also, movingly, the son she didn’t get to meet until years after his birth. Backmatter includes precepts for living derived from her experiences (“If a person has no problems, there is no growth”), but their truth shines through the story as she tells it.
Takeaway: This clear-eyed memoir faces addiction, abuse, and incarceration as it reveals a life that finds purpose in helping others.
Great for fans of: James Brown’s The Los Angeles Diaries, Rachel Moran’s Paid For.
Production grades Cover: B+ Design and typography: A Illustrations: A Editing: A Marketing copy: A
