Childhood Abuse Not Match for Love and Determination

We believe childhood abuse means a lifetime sentence but Laura McHale Holland proves that belief wrong. Her earliest memories of her beloved mother, dead by the time Laura was two, remain lost in the distant past, but her memories of Wanda, the Wicked Witch of the West, Laura's nickname for the woman who became her step mother, remain clear. In her memoir "Resilient Ruins" Laura recounts her life under Wanda's weird command, the ways in which young Laura acted out her loneliness including a suicide attempt, with unflinching honesty. Lacking any sense of frilly sentimentality the memoir punches through our notion that a difficult childhood consigns that person to a life of failure. Instead, award winning author Laura McHale Holland grew into a successful wife, loving mother and to our benefit continues to write about life as a beacon for so many of us.