With the help of a cobbled together family of eccentric fellow addicts and “angels”-a series of friends and strangers who came to her aid at pivotalmoments-she slowly transformed her life from the inside out.Ī Piece of Cake is unlike any memoir you’ll ever read. But Cupcake’s unlikely tour through the cubicle world was paralleled by a quickening descent into the nightmare of crack cocaine use, till she eventually found herself living behind a Dumpster.Īstonishingly, she turned it around. She stumbled into gangbanging, drug dealing, hustling, prostitution, theft, and, eventually, the best scam of all: a series of 9-to-5 jobs. Young Cupcake learned to survive by turning tricks, downing hard liquor, partying like a rock star, and ingesting every drug she could find while hitchhiking up and down the California coast. Her gut-punch sense of humor and eye for the absurd, along with her outsized will, carry her through a fateful series of events that could easily have left her dead. As Cupcake’s troubles grow, so do her voice and spirit. But there comes a point in her preteen years-maybe it’s the night she first tries to run away and is exposed to drugs, alcohol, and sex all at once-when Cupcake’s story shifts from a tear-jerking tragedy to a dark comic blues opera. It begins as the story of a girl orphaned twice over, once by the death of her mother and then again by a child welfare system that separated her from her stepfather and put her into the hands of an epically sadistic foster parent. You have in your hands the strange, heart-wrenching, and exhilarating tale of a woman named Cupcake. 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, or homelessness.Ĭupcake Brown survived all these things before she’d even turned twenty.

A piece of cake by cupcake brown