That Mean Old Yesterday is an

astonishing coming-of-age memoir

by a young woman who survived

the foster care system to become an

award-winning journalist.

No one would ever imagine that the vibrant,

smart, and attractive Stacey Patton had a

childhood from hell. Once a foster child who

found a home, she was supposed to be among

the lucky. On a rainy night in November 1999,

a shoeless Stacey, promising student at NYU,

headed down a New Jersey street toward her

adoptive parents' house. She carried a gun in

her pocket, and she kept repeating to herself

that she would pull the trigger. She wanted to

kill them. Or so she thought.

This is a story of how a typical American

family can be undermined by its own effort

to be perfect on the surface. After all, with

God-fearing, house-proud, and hardworking

adoptive parents, Stacey appeared to beat

the odds. But her mother was tyrannical, and

her father, either so in love with or in fear of

his wife, turned a blind eye to the abuse she

heaped on their love-starved little girl.

In That Mean Old Yesterday, a little girl

rises above the tyranny of an overzealous

mother by channeling her intellectual energy

into schoolwork. Wise beyond her years,

she can see that her chances for survival are

advanced through her struggle to get into an

elite boarding school. She uses all she has, a brilliant mind, to link her experience to the

legacy of American slavery and to successfully

frame her understanding of why her good

adoptive parents did terrible things to her by

realizing that they had terrible things done to

them.

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