Publisher's Synopsis
"Price not only rises above the hurt and hate, she uses her hard-won insights to shine a light for others." -Jeannette Walls, #1 New York Times bestselling author
For readers of Educated, The Glass Castle, and Know My Name comes a powerful memoir that is a remarkable testament of survival and resilience. At once harrowing and exquisite, haunting and inspiring, Kate Price's story will leave readers with a profound assurance in the power to heal.
Kate Price grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania with her sister and parents. Price was destined to leave, and in doing so, to break one of many, unwritten rules when it came to unbroken cycles of poverty, violence, addiction, mental illness, and abuse. She started a new life in Boston where she discovered the truth of her dark past through a series of hazy flashbacks accompanied by a "chilling of her blood and uncomfortable feeling in her bones."
Overcome with unexplainable grief, she sought out Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a trauma specialist, to help her understand these flashbacks. Price discovered what that darkness that lay within her was - that her father had abused and trafficked her as a child. And so began a 10-year quest with a journalist from the Boston Globe, to prove what Price knew to be her truth. With many trips back to the hometown she thought she had left forever, the two eventually found the hard-earned proof Price had been searching for.
Now, in her exquisitely rendered, transformative memoir, Price describes how she broke free of that which had defined her childhood, to create a life and family on her own terms. From victim to advocate, from fearful child to empowered adult, and from despair to triumph, This Happened to Me is a story of astonishing resilience and breathtaking determination.
