Poignant and unforgettable, this memoir is an inspiring account of triumph over childhood adversity as a distinguished psychiatrist applies her expertise to her own true story of growing up orphaned.

Francine Cournos was three years old when her father died, and by the time she was eleven, her mother was dead of breast cancer. "I had been hurled over a cliff," she writes. "The irreversibility of what had happened crashed down on me; a nauseating wave of fear and a flood of tears followed. I didn't know who I was without my mother. What would fill the vast space left by the disappearance of this all-consuming relationship? How would I spend my time?

What would I become?" In answering these questions, Dr. Cournos offers a sharply perceptive portrait of an injured child's inner life, and the moving - even exhilarating - story of the ways in which, after much struggle and with considerable help from others, that injured child living in a foster home grew to become a happy and successful adult.