Summary

Sh!thouse: A Memoir is a story of brutal girlhood. Lauren was seven when she helped her step-father boost rum bottles from the local liquor store. The next year, her biological father took her to a hotel room and shot up heroin in the bathroom. The next day he robbed a bank with a finger gun! When he was released from prison, he moved into Lauren's basement. They spent the weekends smoking cartons of cigarettes, diving into dumpsters and swindling used cars. Lauren's upbringing provided her with only one lens through which she saw herself - shame. And that shame overflowed into every aspect of her life. In this compassionate and gritty real-life fairytale the author, Lauren Dollie Duke, shows how it's possible for good people to do bad things and what it takes to create peace with where you come from in order to find true happiness. This raw and humorous account about trauma, transcendence and resilience challenges the binary of good vs. evil. It lays out the evolution of shame psychology and intergenerational trauma seeking to answer the question of how we unravel ourselves from the history and patterns of our families. Sh!thouse will make you want to investigate your own historical patterns, examine all of your relationships, and forgive everyone, including yourself.It's a tether to our shared humanity which reminds us there is belonging in the world no matter how horrific it was to start. It is a beautifully written map that draws back to the personal root of where sabotaging behavior, shame and limitation is born.