Danced in My Brain: A Woman's Life of Addiction and Recovery

Robert B. MacIntyre is head of the Centre for Relationship Therapy and
Education in Orangeville, Ontario.

This disturbing and raw book chronicles the author’s life as a drug
addict. Sexually abused as a child, Kimberley Mansfield left school and
home at 16 on a quest for acceptance and belonging—a search that took
her through drug use, stripping, prostitution, close encounters with
powerful drug dealers and gangs, and life as a single mother on welfare.
The book is at its most poignant in its descriptions of Mansfield’s
attempts to protect her daughter from the effects of her addiction, and
to get clean—she did manage the latter feat once, for nine years, but
self-hatred and the ready availability of drugs pulled her back down
into addiction. This powerful glimpse into one woman’s struggle
against self-destruction sheds much light on the complexity of addiction
and the devastating experience of those caught in it.