This Happened to Me: A Memoir
By Kate Price

A Washington Post Noteworthy Book (of July and August); a Book Riot Best Nonfiction Book of Summer; one of WBUR (Boston Public Radio) 12 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 authorFor readers of Educated, The Glass Castle, and Know My Name comes a powerful new memoir that is a remarkable testament of survival, resilience, and trauma recovery. At once harrowing and exquisite, haunting and inspiring, Kate Price’s story will leave you with a profound assurance in the power to heal from childhood trauma and overcome generational abuse.Kate Price grew up in a small mill town in central Pennsylvania with her sister and parents in northern Appalachia. Price escaped the unbroken cycles of poverty, violence, domestic abuse, addiction, and mental illness 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 that dark world behind, it still kept a firm grip on her.Overcome with grief and 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 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 uncovered her past. When Price—whose brain had been protecting her by shutting out these horrific memories—felt safe enough, she and der Kolk, discovered what that darkness within her was: Her father had abused and trafficked her as a child.