A Piece of Cake was my choice for "character of color goes on a spiritual journey" for the Book Riot Read Harder challenge this year. This is a memoir, in conversational tone, of a woman named Cupcake Brown. I always find it difficult to rate memoirs - this is a real person's life, how do you quantify that? But still, I persist and four stars was born out of my deep, deep thinking. This was a fucking trip, with a freight train of emotional impact.

It opens with Cupcake at eleven, the time when her life began to fall apart with her mother's death, and continues through to foster care, the sexual, physical and emotional abuse she suffered there and her descent into drug addiction, prostitution and alcoholism with a little gangbanging mixed in.

I was constantly amazed that she lived through her experiences - there were just so many drugs, taken in such high quantities, so constantly, that it seemed like a supernatural event that her body was able to handle them and not die immediately. Cupcake, during the process of her recovery, looks back on her life and truly starts to feel like something was looking out for her. The relationship she developed with her version of God helped Cupcake maintain her sobriety when she felt at her lowest. She never subscribed to any religion, or really joined any church at all - God was just the name of the higher power running the universe and listening to her when she needed it. The trappings and words of specific theologies could hang, for all she cared.

It takes a long, long time for Cupcake to ask for help or even to believe that she needed it in the first place. There were a lot of justifications over the years. If she could maintain a job, she wasn't a junkie, she just liked to party. She definitely wasn't an alcoholic - how could she be, if she had never once gotten a DUI? Cupcake admits later that her hubris blinded her; even during recovery from drug addiction she still was in denial of also being an alcoholic. Her sponsor sets her straight:

"Pride gets us drunk. Ego keeps us drunk. Humility allows us to ask for help; it enables us to get honest about what's really going on inside."

There was constant foreshadowing as to how much worse it was going to get in the future, in the next chapter. Once she became an adult and really started to party, I felt a sense of racing anxiety wondering when it was that Cupcake would hit rock bottom, what it was in this crazy life of hers that made her sit up and take notice and think, "I need to change." Once that happened (a four day bender of dope, drinking and turning tricks behind a dumpster), it was such a profound relief that she was finally, finally able to start being honest with the people in her life. Cupcake becoming sober, meeting supportive people and finally realizing that she had dreams, let alone could actually achieve them, was the perfect ending to this memoir that started out so harshly.

They think I'm outstanding? They think I have character? Don't they know who I am?
The quiet Voice responded.
Of course they do.