Guest Post : Exclusive Memoir Excerpt from Author Cyndy Etler!

Today is a very exciting day on the blog because it's my first ever guest post! Cyndy Etler the author of Dead Inside and now We Can't Be Friends both memoirs following her life in Straight inc and her life after. 

Currently, I am halfway through We Can't Be Friends, and just WOW so far both of Etler's memoirs have been heartbreaking but such important reads.

Thank you so much to Cyndy for sharing her story and to Sourcebooks fire for arcs of her two books.

Today I get to share with everyone an excerpt of Coiled that is unpublished.

When I was thirteen, I ran away from my abusive home. When I was fourteen, I got locked up in notorious “tough love” program Straight Inc. When I was sixteen I was suicidal; when I was seventeen I was date raped. More than once. Today I’m crazy-happy, living my dream, publishing memoirs—first The Dead Inside, then We Can’t Be Friends—about my experiences as a kid. I also teach reading to teens in alternative schools. It was through that work, while teaching with my manuscripts, that I realized how few books tell the younger struggling kid’s real story.

What follows is an excerpt from Coiled, the unpublished prequel to The Dead Inside. Coiled is a memoir told from the point of view of my elementary- and middle-school self. My alternative school students devoured this book, highlighting up to 70% of the lines to show, “This reminds me of my own life.”

As a kid, I would study other children’s loving families and dream of being adopted. I would also dream of adopting my own Cabbage Patch Kid. Here’s the scene where I first encountered one of these dreamy, magical dolls.

Excerpt

First time I learned about Cabbage Patch Kids was when I was at this girl Joanna’s house. It made no sense for me to be there, ‘cause Joanna lives in one of the newest houses on Overbrook Drive. She’s skinny, has designer jeans, and gets to wear eye shadow. But her mom was one of the tippers on my paper route, and she asked if I’d babysit Joanna and her little brother sometimes. That’s how I ended up in Joanna’s room.

As soon as I saw the Cabbage Patch Kid on her bed, all the other stuff in her room disappeared. It was just me and this plump little girl-doll in a red checkered dress. I swear she had her arms out to say, “Hug me!” right to me. But when I went to do that, Joanna popped her gum and the room came back.

“Y’like her?” Joanna said. “I named her Jo, even though her birth certificate said Madilyn Rose.”

“Her birth certificate?”

“Yeah. You don’t know? She’s a Cabbage Patch Kid. They’re sposed to be born in a cabbage field, get it? And the cabbage farmers have got so many of them, they have to put them up for adoption. So when you get one, she comes with adoption papers, which you fill out and send back to the cabbage field.”

She stopped to blow another bubble. I made myself not pop it with a finger, then said, “Hurry up! Tell the rest!”

“Every one of them’s different from the others, just like a real baby. And on her birthday, she gets a card in the mail! From the cabbage patch, get it?”

“No way.”

“Yeah way! And if you change her name, you know, on the birth certificate, they mail you back a new one with the name you chose. See?”

She pointed at the wall, and I looked up at a white frame with ballet slippers and wavy ribbons painted around the edges. Inside it was a serious-looking paper covered with fancy letters, but the most important letters were plain and blocky, underlined in thick black: Joanna Samantha.

Well, that may have been the doll’s name, but it so didn’t fit her. Anyone who looked at her would know she was a Cyndy.

Anyone except Joanna.

“I named her that so she could have two girl names or two boy names, depending on how you say it. She can be Joanna Samantha, or she can be Jo Sam. How cool is that?”

“Oh yeah, very cool,” is what I said. But it’s not what I meant.

Ever since that day, I’ve seen Cabbage Patch Kids everywhere. In TV commercials, on T-shirts in Woolworths, and sometimes in the baby seat of the shopping cart of some lucky girl at ShopRite. But only once did I see them in a store, and even then, it was only two of them—and they were both boys! Who wants a boy Cabbage Patch Kid? Well, somebody did. My sister Kim let me stop to look at them again before we caught the city bus home, and there were zero boy Cabbage Patch Kids left. Man! Cabbage Patch Kids don’t have to spend a second wondering if anyone will adopt them.

For certain real kids, too, it’s easy like that. They get snapped up by someone who really wants them. I don’t know what the diff is, between them and me. Do they like, tell somebody about what their stepfather does to them in the bathroom? Or does God, I don’t know, like them better?

Okay, I have to go back to thinking about Cabbage Patch Kids now. Or else I’ll flip. And things never turn out good when I flip.

 Thank you so much to Cyndy Etler for giving me this opportunity to not only read this excerpt but share it with everyone else as well. I would love to read more about your elementary and middle school years (if your comfortable talking about them). 

Everyone please go and follow Cydny on Twitter and check out her Website as well and go and get copies of her book so we can talk about it!

You can buy The Dead Inside and We Can't Be Friends on Amazon by click on the titles! (not affiliate links just really want more people to read her work)