Jeannette Walls tells the story about her childhood. She talks about living like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Retreating to the dismal West Virginia mining town--and the family-- her father, Rex Walls, had done everything he could to escape. He drank. He stole the grocery money and disappeared for days. As the dysfunction of the family escalated, Jeannette and her brother and sisters had to fend for themselves,...

"The night the trailer burned down, I think Daddy was the one who set it on fire. . . . "
For a long time, Edie thought she had escaped. It started in an Appalachian trailer park, where a young girl dreamed of becoming a doctor. But every day, Edie woke up to her reality: a poverty-stricken world where getting out seemed impossible. Where, at twelve years old, she taught herself to drive a truck so she could get her drunk daddy home from...

In this raw testimony of a heart-breaking, hardscrabble childhood, Doug Wallace paints an unforgettable portrait of a child determined to free himself from the cycle of poverty that strangled his family for generations.

"They were five kids with five different fathers and an alcoholic mother who left them to fend for themselves for weeks at a time. Yet through it all they had each other. Rosie, the youngest, is fawned over and shielded by her older sister, Regina. Their mother, Cookie, blows in and out of their lives 'like a hurricane, blind and uncaring to everything in her path'. But when Regina discloses the truth about her abusive mother to her social worker,...