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A beautiful, startling, and candid memoir about growing up without boundaries, in which Ariel Leve recalls with candor and sensitivity the turbulent time she endured as the only child of an unstable poet for a mother and a beloved but largely absent father, and explores the consequences of a psychologically harrowing childhood as she seeks refuge from the past and recovers what was lost.

Ariel Leve grew up in Manhattan with an eccentric mother she describes as "a poet, an artist, a self-appointed troublemaker and attention seeker." Leve learned to become her own parent, taking care of herself and her mother's needs. There would be uncontrolled, impulsive rages followed with denial, disavowed responsibility, and then extreme outpourings of affection. How does a child learn to feel safe in this topsy-turvy world of conditional love?

Leve captures the chaos and lasting impact of a child's life under siege and explores how the coping mechanisms she developed to survive later incapacitated her as an adult. There were material comforts, but no emotional safety, except for summer visits to her father's home in South East Asia--an escape that was terminated after he attempted to gain custody. Following the death of a loving caretaker, a succession of replacements raised Leve--relationships which resulted in intense attachment and loss. It was not until decades later, when Leve moved to other side of the world, that she could begin to emancipate herself from the past. In a relationship with a man who has children, caring for them yields clarity of what was missing.

In telling her haunting story, Leve seeks to understand the effects of chronic psychological maltreatment on a child's developing brain, and to discover how to build a life for herself that she never dreamed possible: An unabbreviated life.

Martha Plimpton, in addition to audio narration, is a film, television, and stage actress. Her first major film roles include The River Rat, The Goonies, and The Mosquito Coast. On stage she made her Chicago debut with the Steppenwolf Theatre Company Ensemble, during which time she received a National Medal of Arts Award. She won the Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards for her performance in Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia and has received numerous Tony Award nominations for supporting or featured actress. Her television roles included Grey's Anatomy and Raising Hope, among others. In narration, she won an AudioFile Earphones Award for her reading of Alice McDermott's After This, which also was a finalist in 2007 for the prestigious Audie Award.

Ariel Leve is an award-winning journalist who has written for the Guardian, Financial Times Magazine, the Telegraph, the Observer, and the London Sunday Times Magazine, where she was a senior writer and a columnist. At the British Press Awards she was short-listed twice for Interviewer of the Year and Highly Commended twice. Her books include It Could Be Worse, You Could Be Me.