The Life of a Real Girl by Johanna Garfield
And I had to face it - in some remarkable, paradoxical way, they were some of the happiest memories I had. In the place of broken lives, cripped personalities, hopelessness and despair, I had found a new life, had been able to break with the past; had, in effect, been given the chance to create a new person - a synthesis of the old and the new, of the two "me's." I had lived that lief intensely here; we all did. And here I had found love, lived out my childhood fantasies of stardom, learned to deal with rejection, cope with envy, face death - and survive.