{ "item_title" : "This Happened to Me", "item_author" : [" Kate Price "], "item_description" : "A Washington Post Noteworthy Book (of July and August); a Book Riot Best Nonfiction Book of Summer; WBUR (Boston Public Radio) Twelve Books to Read This Summer Price not only rises above the hurt and hate, she uses her hard-won insights to shine a light for others. --Jeannette Walls, #1 New York Times bestselling author For readers of Educated, The Glass Castle, and Know My Name comes a powerful new memoir that is a remarkable testament of survival and resilience. At once harrowing and exquisite, haunting and inspiring, Kate Price's story will leave readers with a profound assurance in the power to heal. Kate Price grew up in a small mill town in central Pennsylvania with her sister and parents in northern Appalachia. At the insistence of her mother, and through her academic accomplishments, Price escaped the unbroken cycles of poverty, violence, addiction, mental illness, and abuse that had plagued her family for generations. She started a new life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in pursuit of her master's and PhD. But despite having left this dark world behind, it still kept a firm grip on her. Overcome with unexplainable grief and sadness and having sustained a series of hazy flashbacks accompanied by a chilling of her blood and uncomfortable feeling in her bones, Price sought out Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a trauma specialist to help heal her constant emotional pain through EMDR therapy. He went on to write the bestselling book, The Body Keeps the Score, which features Price's story, as the two worked together to find out about her past. When Price, whose brain had been protecting her by shutting out these horrific memories, felt safe enough, she along with van der Kolk as her guide, discovered what that darkness that lay within her was. Her father had abused and trafficked her as a child. Price grappled with what had been revealed. Did this really happen to her? How could a parent do this to a child? A dedicated researcher and academic, she knew she needed confirmation, proof that what she had remembered had happened. And so began a 10-year quest alongside a journalist, to prove what Price knew to be her truth. With many trips back to the hometown she thought she had left forever, the two eventually found the hard-earned evidence Price had been searching for. In this exquisitely rendered, transformative memoir, Price describes how she broke free of that which had defined her childhood and went on to create a purpose-driven life and family, on her own terms. Eventually returning to the same Appalachian community to use her education and advocacy to help ensure children are given the attention, protection, and services that she never received. From victim to advocate, from fearful child to empowered adult, and from despair to triumph, This Happened to Me is a story of astonishing resilience and breathtaking determination.", "item_img_path" : "https://covers1.booksamillion.com/covers/bam/1/66/803/622/1668036223_b.jpg", "price_data" : { "retail_price" : "29.99", "online_price" : "29.99", "our_price" : "29.99", "club_price" : "29.99", "savings_pct" : "0", "savings_amt" : "0.00", "club_savings_pct" : "0", "club_savings_amt" : "0.00", "discount_pct" : "10", "store_price" : "29.99" } }

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Sometimes protective instincts kick in and people pursue survival with barely a thought. After her father ripped the door from her sister’s bedroom, Kate Price ran outside screaming. She needed to escape before her raging father came after her. But Price’s mom pulled her inside: “What will the neighbors think?” Price kept the pain of her father’s abuse private. Though her memories of his violence and times when he held her close—like a lover, not a daughter—were vivid, Price’s mind also blanked out parts of her experience. She remembered that her father would wake her, insert a needle in her arm and take her from her bed, but she couldn’t recall what happened next. “Only special little girls get to be sexy,” he would say. Shame and confusion haunted Price for decades. In talk therapy, she couldn’t bring herself to discuss the sexual abuse she’d experienced. But when she began working with trauma specialist Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, Price began processing. She felt safe with van der Kolk, and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) therapy allowed Price to recall her father drugging her and selling her to other men for sex. Price’s story may be familiar to readers of van der Kolk’s bestseller, The Body Keeps the Score, where Price appears as a case study. She revisits her trauma and healing journey in her frank, clear-eyed memoir, This Happened to Me: A Reckoning. Price uses unadorned language to recount her decades-long path to health and to understanding the abuse she experienced at her father’s hands. As she recalled devastating experiences from her childhood, Price became determined to learn what happened to her. For 10 years, she worked alongside a Boston Globe reporter to investigate her own abuse. As they met with people in Price’s rural Appalachian hometown, they were able to piece together a picture of sex trafficking. (The resulting article, “Kate Price remembers something terrible,” made reporter Janelle Nanos a 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist.) During her years of therapy and her search to understand what happened to her, Price also pursued an academic understanding of human trafficking. Now a Wellesley College research scientist who studies commercial sexual exploitation of children and child sex trafficking policy at the state level, Price is determined to use her experience to protect others. When Price and Nanos return to Price’s hometown and sites of abuse, Price leans on the skills she’s learned and healing she’s experienced through EMDR and therapy. The pain she recounts is difficult to read, but artfully told. Price doesn’t use her history for shock value. Instead, This Happened to Me weaves exploration of patterns of abuse, privilege and class with the story of a woman who wants to understand her own life.