Minka Kelly’s memoir is unlike anything I have read before. It’s not a Hollywood story about an actor. It’s about a little girl who raised by a single mother that worked as a stripper to make ends meet. Her mom isn’t only a stripper. She’s also a drug addict. She’s a young mom with no family, no home, and nobody to call on when she needs help. As a result, she brings her little 6-year-old daughter with her wherever she goes.
Little Minka sleeps on the floor in the back of a strip club while her mom performs. When her mom’s not stripping, Minka sleeps on random couches in whatever dude’s house her mom has hooked up with for the night. When her mother ends up broke, she begs a landlord to let her and Minka live in the storage closet of an apartment building. This Friday Night Lights actress was raised in a storage closet of an apartment building in Hollywood. Her living conditions are so desolate it’s almost too hard to imagine that a kindergartener lived in a closet with her mother for years.
What I love about this book is that Kelly writes the story from her childlike perspective. She doesn’t know anything other than life in a storage closet and sleeping on stranger’s couches. Her unawareness for how bad her living conditions are don’t come into play until later in her life. This is one reason why this memoir is so important. It reveals how resilient a child can be, while also showing how a child raised in a traumatic living situation will be deeply impacted by this later in life.
Another impactful lesson in this memoir is that through all of the abuse and neglect, Kelly learns how to forgive the adults in her life that hurt her as a little girl. She learns that resentment will kill you in the end, and only by forgiving those that abandoned her will she be set free.
3 Things This Memoir Will Help You Understand About Children Raised In Abusive Homes:
1. Forgiveness is the only way to heal resentment toward family members.
Minka Kelly was raised in a closet in the heart of Hollywood, but she learned how to forgive her mother, who was a drug addict and abandoned her numerous times, her birth father, who shows up in her life when she is 18-years-old, and her step-father who beat her. Her ability to see the brokenness in all of these adults she called “family” that hurt her is one of the greatest lessons in forgiveness one could read about.
2. How challenging it is for a child who has a parent struggling with addiction to get ahead in life.
Minka Kelly’s memoir is a glimpse into a life that we don’t often hear about because so many little kids born into impoverished communities with addicts for parents don’t ever get the resources to go much further than where they came from. As a result, we don’t often hear stories like Kelly’s. Kelly walks us through every moment in her life, from gangs, to fist fights, living in poverty, and when she ended up in juvenile, showing us how high the cards are stacked against a little girl with a single mom struggling with addiction.
3.What happens to a child’s development when they have parent who never shows up for them.
Kelly’s parents are hardly around. Her mother is stripping most nights, then gone for weeks at a time, and her mother’s boyfriend is often traveling and doing drug deals. Kelly has dozens of friends that also don’t have parents around. Yet, she does have one friend with a present parent. This parent cooks for her and even lets Kelly live at her house for weeks when she has nobody around. This story is a beautiful reminder that if you are a parent and see a kid without a present mom or dad, by opening your home, cooking them a meal, or letting that kid spend the night at your house, even for one night, it can be enough of an impact to change the trajectory of that little kid’s life forever. This is the power of love, even when it comes from a parent that is not the birth parent of a child.
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