House of Pretend

Perfect for fans of The Glass Castle and Educated, this raw, powerful memoir recounts one woman's journeyfrom gritty 1970s Brooklyn to testosterone-fueled 1980s1990s Wall Street and beyondto reclaim truth, identity, and self-worth after trauma.A powerful memoir of trauma, resilience, and female empowerment, House of Pretend tells the story of a girl who, raised in the shadow of her father's death by an emotionally abusive, narcissistic mother, learns early to perform, to please, and to pretendand spends the rest of her life struggling to unlearn those behaviors. Determined to escape the silence and neglect of her childhood, Joanne claws her way into the male-dominated world of Wall Street as a young womanonly to find that success means nothing without self-worth. When her boss offers her a million dollars to have his child, she is forced to reckon with everything she's buried: the deep ache of abandonment, years of chasing love in all the wrong places, and the belief that she's undeserving of more. What follows is not a transformation into someone new but rather a fierce unmaskinga reclamation of the voice, worth, and identity she has had within her all along. Offering a gripping blend of raw emotion and biting clarity, House of Pretend is about what happens when a woman stops waiting to be saved and instead saves herselfwith grit, honesty, and just the right amount of badassery.