A Daughter's Memoir of Growing Up in Alaska's UnderworldShe was an ordinary girl trapped in an extraordinary childhood, someone who dreamed of going to parties and getting good grades while living in an after-hours hell of pimps and con men. Kim Rich longed for normalcy, yet she was inescapably her father's child, and she had no choice but to grow up fast. . . Her mother was a stripper and B-girl; her father was a major player in the underworld of Anchorage in the sixties, a city flush with new-found oil money. Only after her father was gruesomely murdered and Kim became a journalist was she able to fill in the missing pieces of one American dream gone horribly wrong. . . Based on a series of award-winning articles that originally appeared in the ANCHORAGE DAILY NEWS, Kim's true story is a tale of a woman's search for her parents' secrets. What she finds is both shocking and tragic, but in the end she's able to discover her true self amid the remnants of her parents' lost lives.
"The grittiest, most memorable Alaskan story I've ever read. An evocative and deeply moving memoir of a most unusual family."
--Joe McGinniss, author of "Fatal Vision""This memoir poses the question, 'Which offenses from our childhood are forgivable and which ones are not?' . . . [Rich's] book is . . . the story of a gutsy child's survival, the kind that should go straight to the heart."
--NY Times
"Rich does an amazing job of searching out legal and hospital records, plus letters and diaries of her dead parents, and of interviewing cops, lawyers, former B-girls, and family members--all in an effort to lay to rest the ghosts within her . . . Compelling."
--Kirkus Review
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Born in Hollywood, raised in Anchorage, and with an MFA degree in writing from Columbia University, Kim M. Rich teaches at Alaska Pacific University.
