Cupcake Brown is, without question, an amazing woman who has risen from the ashes to become a highly respected, influential lawyer and professional speaker. She has many important life memories to share with her readers.

However, her memoir as a whole is a poorly edited, slightly-rambling account of a troubled youth and early adulthood. I'm not begrudging the author her success, or her well-deserved acclaim, but as a book, her memoir is sub-par.

First, the text could have been trimmed by at least a third, if not half, by removing agonizingly long passages in which Brown doubts herself and repeats the same inner thoughts again and again, in slightly different phrasing. The author portrays herself as skeptical and non-trusting when nice people trying to help her, and then as innocent and trusting when evil people are abusing or using her. When she's skeptical, it isn't conveyed in a few simple sentences, but rather in long dialogue than consists primarily of Brown yelling profanities at another person and refusing to hear their true intentions.

After about the second dozen profanity-laced tirades from the author, the effect was totally lost. Also, any reader really has to question her ability to recall the precise, agonizingly long details of every conversation when she was drunk and high.

As an armchair detective, I found Brown's narrative to be slightly frustrating in its lack of full detail on many developments, especially those with the custody battles and criminal proceedings. She presented anecdotes from the point of view of a child or an adolescent, but then failed to follow-up with a plausible explanation for why custody would be awarded to an absent father, how her loving uncle could stand by when adults had documented child abuse wounds on her back, why her brother refused to protect or love her, and more.

I'm a fan of memoirs about addiction and recovery, and in that subject category, this book fails. The scandalous details have some high points, but get repetitive and drawn out (no reader needs to be educated on what a blackout is, and by the 20th time she reminded us that her Long Islands were with "no coke and no ice," the point had been belabored). Also, her recovery isn't inspirational, nor does it draw the reader in on an emotional level. (Try Caroline Knapp's Drinking: A Love Story if you want to vicariously experience addiction and recovery.)

Brown is, as I said in my opening, a talented and inspirational woman. She's not a terrific book writer, and unfortunately, no one edited this book for readability. Let her book be a lesson to future writers of tell-alls: an editor, a copywriter, and even a ghostwriter can go a long way in improving the presentation of your story.