Anger Is My Middle Name

Book excerpt: An empowering memoir of resilience and redemption, and the rage that helped a girl escape the darkness of a harrowing childhood. Born to a violently dysfunctional home in working-class Denmark, Lisbeth Zornig Andersen and her three older brothers were bounced between foster care and state-run institutions, then back again to their chemically dependent mother and sadistic stepfather. For Lisbeth, it was a childhood without perimeters. It was blighted by poverty, sexual abuse, neglect, betrayal, and further victimization by the broken Danish social services system that forced Lisbeth to live where and how it saw fit. Coming of age with a myriad of fears and emotional disorders, Lisbeth had three things that would become driving forces in her life: she was extraordinarily bright, extremely willful, and exceptionally angry. From hell to liberation, this is Lisbeth's emotional and galvanizing memoir told in two voices: that of a young girl who was unwanted, challenged, and defiant, and that of a woman who channeled her rage into a positive force as a passionate advocate for children's rights. Whatever darkness defines the past, it can be used to change the future. Lisbeth's heart-wrenching and ultimately uplifting journey is proof.