She ran away, finding refuge with a young prostitute who gave her drugs as well as tips on how to sell her sexual favors on the street. Ran Away from Foster HomesĪs she recounts in her memoir, A Piece of Cake, Brown was given alcohol and was physically and sexually assaulted within the first week in her foster home. As soon as she was taken away from her stepfather and placed in foster care, her troubles began. Brown grew up in San Diego, California, and enjoyed a fairly typical childhood until age 11, when she came home one day to discover her mother lying dead in bed from an epileptic seizure. She received her unusual name when her mother, not fully alert after giving birth in 1964, asked for a cupcake and the delivery room nurse wrote that down on the birth certificate. Though Brown was not born into a privileged family, her first years were stable and happy. Putting herself through school, Brown established herself in an intensely competitive profession and began traveling throughout the country as a motivational speaker and advocate. Finally, she found enough strength in her religious faith to succeed in beating the obstacles that had once seemed impossible to overcome. As she struggled for many years to get clean and sober, Brown continually succumbed to the lure of street life. Involved with gangs and often homeless, she endured rape, alcoholism, serious injury in a drive-by shooting, and other assaults. “Dazzles you with the amazing change that is possible in one lifetime.An attorney at one of the leading law firms in San Francisco, California, Cupcake Brown spent 14 years as a drug addict and prostitute after leaving an abusive foster home. of a remarkable life filled with pain and wisdom, hope and redemption.” - San Fracisco Chronicle “ reflects now with insight and honesty on her experiences. Moving in its frankness, this is the most satisfying, startlingly funny, and genuinely affecting tour through hell you’ll ever take. She stumbled into gangbanging, drug dealing, hustling, prostitution, theft, and, eventually, the best scam of all: a series of 9-to-5 jobs.Ī Piece of Cake is unlike any memoir you’ll ever read.

Orphaned by the death of her mother and left in the hands of a sadistic foster parent, young Cupcake Brown learned to survive by turning tricks, downing hard liquor, and ingesting every drug she could find while hitchhiking up and down the California coast. There are shelves of memoirs about overcoming the death of a parent, childhood abuse, rape, drug addiction, miscarriage, alcoholism, hustling, gangbanging, near-death injuries, drug dealing, prostitution, and homelessness.Ĭupcake Brown survived all these things before she’d even turned twenty.Īnd that’s when things got interesting. Her life is nothing short of a miracle.”- Chicago Sun-Times The heart-wrenching, uplifting tale about a woman named Cupcake.

A piece of cupcake book