A PLACE CALLED HOME

Moving testimony from a survivor of trauma.

In his riveting debut memoir, lawyer and child welfare advocate Ambroz recounts an early life of poverty, cruelty, and degradation. With his mother suffering from severe mental illness, he and his two older siblings moved from New York City to Albany to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, living on the streets, in shelters, and occasionally in crumbling apartments from which, inevitably, they were evicted. Caught in a cycle of “homelessness, hunger, housing, welfare, and homelessness again,” Ambroz tried to mitigate his mother’s volatility by insulating her from triggers that would set her off. Not least, keeping her stable meant protecting himself and his siblings from countless “inexplicable moment[s] of brutal, casual cruelty.” Besides exposing the “illness, infection, infestation, and unmet needs” that marked his childhood, Ambroz indicts a system of severely inadequate social services. “The system doesn’t trust people in poverty,” he writes, and his desperate pleas for help were ignored: “Over and over again the three of us were left with a woman who was clearly hurting us by people in positions of authority.” When they were removed from their mother, the path to foster placement was fraught with obstacles. Ambroz was considered a special problem: Though he feared outing himself as gay, therapists—and one macho foster father—tried to “fix” him. After temporary housing in a juvenile detention facility and group homes, he was sent to a family that abused and exploited him. One of 450,000 children in foster care, Ambroz managed—with the help of sympathetic supporters and his own fierce determination—to escape the system that threatened to relegate him to the same “slide from poverty to disaster” that dogged his youth. Beginning in high school, as a member of the National Foster Youth Advisory Council, he has worked for meaningful reform, and with this potent memoir, he urges readers to “become one of the changemakers.” The author is now the head of Community Engagement (West) for Amazon.

A haunting, inspiring chronicle of fortitude and perseverance.