360 pages. Book is in Very good condition throughout.
I could hear voices around me and I sensed their anxiety, but I was too drowsy to make out what they were saying. It seemed like forever. It was probably only five minutes, then I felt the pressure of a tube being forced down my throat. It was very frightening. I was only a twelve-year-old child, and this was my first overdose. As the doctors worked on my body I saw things a lot more clearly, and I knew then that I wasn't going to die. I never really wanted to die, I just did not want to live...'Give me everything in the till - notes only! Don't make me nervous or I'll shoot!' The waitress handed me the money, I fled back to the car and John hightailed it out of there...This incredible book will grip you with horror. Roxanne Holmes tells her horrific story as she saw it through a drug-induced haze. As a child she was raped by her stepfather, then sent to a succession of brutal homes and remand centres as her behaviour grew more and more uncontrollable.
At seventeen, she was on the run across Australia, living hand to mouth out of an old car, holding up shops and service stations to please the convicted child molester who had 'befriended' her, trying to block out her demons: memories of an abused childhood, life on the streets, years in and out of institutions, cold and hungry on the run, panic attacks in jail. Slashing herself with a razor blade or broken glass was the only thing she knew to do when she could not stand her existence no longer, when not even the drugs could keep the terror at bay. You'd imagine Roxanne would have died on the streets of an overdose by now, but somehow, incredibly, she has turned her life around. She has been drug-free for several years, has a home of her own and a young daughter on whom she lavishes the love she never felt as a child. It's hard to believe that so much could happen to one person before the age of twenty. It's hard to believe anyone could have survived what she went through. "Roxanne" is her story, the story of an extraordinary life and an unbreakable spirit. You won't be able to put this book down until you reach the last page.
Author Information: Roxanne is now 30, and lives in Bilgola with her six year old daughter and boyfriend. She is still being treated for agoraphobia, and wants to write a handbook for sufferers of agoraphobia. She is also involved in helping abused children and an active campaigner against remand institutions like the ones she had to endure when she was growing up. Selling Points: A gripping memoir in the style of "Go Ask Alice" and Christiane F, Roxanne will have even greater impact, because of the Australian setting. Despite being a traumatic and harrowing story, "Roxanne" has a positive and upbeat ending which reflects Roxanne's philosophy that the human spirit can overcome any obstacles, as she has proven. Roxanne is no stranger to the media, as the following clippings show. She has been the subject of a "Sixty Minutes" story, and Jeff McMullen wants to do a follow-up story, which will be great for the book - expect megapublicity. Roxanne's journey from Australia's most wanted to model parent is an extraordinary one, and compellingly told.
At one stage, when she was in institutions, she was so uncontrollable that every youth worker in NSW went on strike, saying she was too hard to deal with!
