Writer Cupcake Brown is living proof that people can turn their lives around, even in the most dire circumstances. As a young woman, she was a drug addict, a runaway, a high school dropout and a gang member. Today, she is a motivational speaker and author and has a thriving law career in litigation.

Her book, ‘Piece of Cake’ published by Crown Publishers in 2006, is a moving and highly inspirational account of Miss Brown’s troubled early life, starting with the death of her mother at a young age, and her determined efforts to pull herself out of the muck of alcohol and drug addiction.

“There were several reasons I decided to write a book,” Miss Brown told the Royal Gazette in a telephone interview. “A professor in college was the first one that said I needed to write a book. I said, ‘no way’. It was enough just to be honest with the people I knew, leaving out publication. Once I started being honest I started getting requests to speak at different events.”

She told her story for free for several years, but afterward there would often be long lines of people asking for more information about her life.

“My audiences kept saying, ‘you should write a book’,” she said. “The final thing was I had been in several newspapers throughout my career. Every single story had a mistake in it. I decided that if I couldn’t get the story done right, I would write it myself.”

Miss Brown had never done any writing before writing ‘Piece of Cake’. Since publication, her book has been on the New York Times Best-seller List, was a finalist for the 2006 Books for a Better Life award, and won an honorary mention from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association in the non-fiction category.

And the response from the general public has been overwhelming. It takes her four months to respond to an email from a reader, and she was recently invited to appear on the Montel Williams show.

But she said writing a book about her life was not an easy task. She warned other potential memoir writers to come to terms with their demons before trying to write about them.

“I get a lot of e-mails and inquiries from people who say they want to tell their story,” she said. “Make sure you have dealt with your issues in the past. If you haven’t dealt with them writing about it will send you over the edge.

“For me, reliving the good times was good, and reliving the bad times was very bad,” she said. “It was very cathartic. I could deal with it though, because I already had put the bad times away. Part of the 12 Step Programme is peeling away the layers of your life, like an onion, and facing some difficult times in life.”

She said one fall-out from writing a memoir, was being contacted by people in her past.

“Some of my old homies have contacted me,” she said. “I was a bit concerned that I had broken the code of silence, and that to get back at me they would say I was never a gangster or try to discredit me. Out of the two homies, one is in prison doing life for a horrible crime. He sent the word that he was proud of me. The other has gotten her life back in order.”

This second, contacted Miss Brown, worried that she would be outted for her former life.

“She is married and has a couple of kids and no one knows her past,” Miss Brown said. “Not even her husband knows that she used to be a gangbanger. She was concerned that I would out her. That was not my motive. This is about me. She is doing very well. One reason she was afraid is that society is so judgmental. Once they learn about your past, people tend to see you as that only.”

Despite coming so far in life, Miss Brown is still sometimes overshadowed by her former life. She works in securities litigation and general civil litigation, but she originally wanted to be a district attorney.

“I applied with several district attorney offices, but because of my past they didn’t trust me,” she said. “So I couldn’t get a job to save my life. The big firms were begging for me.

“It was a blessing in disguise because the big firm pay me the money that allows me to take the time off whenever I need it to write the book or fly to different places to speak. I speak about once a month.”

Once the book came out, many of her fellow-lawyers gave her the cold shoulder.

“Most of my colleagues were not supportive, to be honest,” she said. “Some of them have never seen a gangbanger except on television, then they turn around and have a former one sitting next to them.

“They are almost like ‘how dare you’. Some of them think I don’t belong there. Ninety percent of the time it is ignorance and fear.

“The younger lawyers are usually idiots when it comes to things like that. The older lawyers tend to be more mature and know the world doesn’t revolve around them. They know that people have different kinds of struggles”.

She said the chapter on her gang activities is very short, because she did not want to glamorise gangsters in any way.

“I wanted people to understand how gangs are so influential,” she said. “They are made up of normal kids, who usually come from good homes. These kids are trying to fill the void of love and camaraderie.”

One of the good things that has come out of the book is the creation of a safehouse for young girls in San Francisco, California who want to escape from prostitution.

“I worked with the San Francisco district attorney,” she said. “She created a task force. We met twice a month. Our job was to develop and establish a format and plan for a safehouse for teenage prostitutes in San Francisco.”

The two women hoped that the safe house would be so successful other places would copy it as a model.

“We worked on it for nine months,” Miss Brown said. “We took the proposal to the city counsel and they voted unanimously to follow our suggestions. It is unusual in the sense that the location of it is secret.”

Girls who enter the safehouse have to really want to be there. They must go through a process to prove that they are ready to change.

“If you get someone in there who is not serious she will put everyone else at risk,” said Miss Brown.

“Pimps and Johns are looking for them. So far the safehouse is doing quite well. Once it was up and running I stepped back. I didn’t want to take anything from the girls, and I didn’t want my story to cloud theirs.”

She has been asked on several occasions if she intends to write another book. She said she is considering it.

“I haven’t even started the second one,” she said. “I don’t want it to seem like I am trying to draw out ‘A Piece of Cake’ to make money. I have been going through the emails and looking at the requests.

“The recovery part of the book is the shortest part. There is a lot of unanswered questions. I am considering if I answered all those question would it be enough to write another book?”For more information about Cupcake Brown go to her website at http://www.cupcakebrown.com/ . To contact the bookworm beat email bookwormbeat1@hotmail.com .