Secrets Hidden

tells the true story of a woman rising from the ashes of her harrowing childhood. Living with her family in an old, dusty Mercury, author Robin Rae Schillereff traveled from state to state with her alcoholic parents and her older brother, Johnny. In this memoir, as she recounts the ups and downs of her journey as the daughter of a traveling salesman, long-forgotten memories emerge. Episodes unfurl with humor and pathos, guided by parents who were often too self-absorbed to understand how their frivolous actions affected their daughter. As she recalls her childhood in the 1950s, the dramatic response that she had to these life changes as an adult becomes clear. Robin also writes about her substance abuse and the very close calls she has with an overdose and her subsequent hospitalization. She opens up about all of the secrets she has held inside since her childhood—the feelings of abandonment by her father and her confusion about her early years. Moved by her will to survive, she was a girl who lived by the side of the road for much of her early childhood. Uplifting, funny, and heartbreaking, Secrets Hidden makes clear the resilience of one woman in the face of such an unusual childhood.