Imagine a quiet,16-year-old, Jewish girl who has spent two years living with her mother's devastating depressions and manic rants caused by bipolar disorder. Add her father's anger and cruelty. Judith's life is unbearable. Eventually, she rebels to escape but ends up facing a teacher who assaults her, and later, the horror of stranger-rape and its aftermath, her parents unable to support her. She is 18 when she leaves home altogether, and in 1970 enters the perils of the larger world. She never returns to live at home, and she faces the challenges of this wider world alone. *How does this 18-year-old girl manage to survive on her own? * *How does she find her strength? * *In this extraordinary memoir, you will travel Judith's journey as though you are right beside her and root for her at every electrifying turn. * She comes face to face with her emotional ties back home in Denver--her mother's illness, her feelings toward her father, her Judaism. And, she is forced to confront her failures and successes as her marriages, divorces, her daughter, and her own eventual diagnosis of major depressive disorder test her. Eventually, she tackles the caretaking of her aging and dying mother. *Celebrate Judith's survival and resilience while taking a step back into the 60s and 70s by reading her unforgettable story. *