We Are All Shipwrecks: A Memoir

A mother's murder. Her daughter's redemption. And the complicated past that belongs to them both.

Kelly always knew her family was different. She knew that most children didn't live with their grandparents and that their grandparents didn't own porn stores. Her classmates didn't sleep on a boat in the L.A. harbor, and she knew their next-door neighbors probably weren't drug addicts and johns. She knew that most of her classmates knew more about their moms than their cause of death. What Kelly didn't know was if she would become part of the dysfunction that surrounded her. Would she end up selling adult videos and sinking into the depths of harbor life, or would she escape to live her own story somewhere else?

As an adult, Kelly decides to discover how the place where she came from defined the person she ultimately became. To do this, she goes back to the beginning—to a mother she never knew, a thirty-year-old cold case, and two of Los Angeles's most notorious murderers.

We Are All Shipwrecks is Kelly's story of redemption from tragedy, told with a tenderness toward her family that makes it as much about preserving the strings that anchor her as it is about breaking free.