Bad Girl: Confessions Of A Teenage Delinquent

Three years ago, fifteen year old Abigail Vona lived a life so far out of control (booze, boys, drugs, stealing, and runaway charges) that her father committed her to Peninsula Village, a controversial treatment facility for "behavior modification" in Louisville, Tennessee. She was kept inside this "level-three lockdown" and "wilderness boot camp" for nearly a year. And though it all started out as a nightmare, it eventually became her salvation. An errant soul at war with the world and especially with herself, Vona unabashedly takes readers inside her own private Idaho. And while she negotiates the dangerous terrain of this "tough love" program, she reveals many dark secrets of the Bad Girl sisterhood. Contending with various behavioral problems (sexual excess, violence, drug addiction, anorexia, self-mutilation, etc.) some of these girls succeed, while others must continue serving their term, or worse, be kicked back to their desperate lives on the outside. Vona tells her vivid story with a twelve-step, chapter-by-chapter descent to rock bottom which arcs into a twelve-step, chapter-by-chapter ascent to a new way of seeing her life. Most controversial, Vona secured, and includes throughout the book, excerpts from her actual psychiatric "progress notes" to both underscore and belie her narrative. A book that will resonate with young women and their mothers alike, Bad Girl is an Every Girl story of teenage rebellion and discovery, accelerated to the extreme.