The founder of the Heritage Home Foundation nonprofit documents her secret abuse-marked childhood in and out of foster care and what she discovered while investigating the story of her mother's own harrowing past.

No one outside her immediate family would have guessed that Plymale's childhood was fraught with every imaginable hardship: a mentally ill mother who was in and out of jails and psych wards throughout Stephanie's formative years, neglect, hunger, poverty, homelessness, truancy, foster homes, a harrowing lack of medical care, and worse. She knew very little about her mother's past until a phone call lead to a series of shocking revelations that forced her to revise the meaning of almost every aspect of her very compromised childhood. -- adapted from jacket and Amazon info