That Mean Old Yesterday A Memoir [Paperback]

An astonishing coming-of-age memoir by a young woman who survived the foster care system to become an award-winning journalist

On a rainy night in November 1999, a shoeless Stacey Patton, promising student at NYU, approached her adoptive parents' house with a gun in her hand. She wanted to kill them. Or so she thought.

No one would ever imagine that the vibrant, smart, and attractive Stacey had a childhood from hell. After all, with God-fearing, house-proud, and hardworking adoptive parents, she appeared to beat the odds. But her mother was tyrannical, and her father turned a blind eye to the years of abuse his wife heaped on their love-starved little girl.

Now in her beautiful memoir, Stacey links her experience to the legacy of American slavery and successfully frames her understanding of why her good adoptive parents did terrible things to her by realizing they had terrible things done to them. [A]n unforgettable document of uniquely intelligent triumph. -- David Levering Lewis, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography Raw with pain, anger, and yearning,That Mean Old Yesterdayalso crackles with an abundance of intelligence, courage, and pure guts. Stacey Patton survived a childhood of abandonment and abuse and built herself into an accomplished, truly self-made young woman. Her memoir will grab you by the heart and blow your mind. A stunning literary debut. -- Jill Nelson, author of the bestselling memoirVolunteer Slaveryand, most recently,Finding Martha's Vineyard: African Americans at Home on an Island Stacey Patton is a tour-de-force writer -- weaving together her many gifts as a natural storyteller as well as a steel-eyed historian, scholar, sage, poet, and journalist. InThat Mean Old Yesterday, Patton performs a kind of sleight of hand by telling her own heartbreaking and triumphant story in context of the collective journey of African Americans -- out of slavery, through freedom, toward redemptl“8