After Perfect: A Daughter’s Memoir

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A searing memoir of loss and redemption (People) that exposes the side of The Wolf of Wall Street we didnrsquo;t get to see (Metro), After Perfect is a cautionary tale about one family destruction in the wake of the Wall Street implosion.Selected as one of the years Fifteen Books You Need to Read by the Village Voice, Christina McDowells unflinching memoir is a tale of the American Dream upended. Growing up in an affluent Washington, DC, suburb, Christina and her sisters were surrounded by the elite: summering on Nantucket Island, speeding down Capitol Hills rich back roads, flying in their fathers private plane. Their life of luxury was brutally stripped away after the FBI arrested Tom Prousalis on fraud charges. When he took a plea deal as he faced the notorious Wolf of Wall Street Jordan Belforts testifying against him, the cars, homes, jewelry, clothes, and friends that defined the family disappeared before their eyes, including the one thing they could never get back: each other.Christina writes with candid clarity about the dark years that followed and the devastation her fathers crimes wrought upon her family: the debt accumulated under her identity; her mothers breakdown; her own spiral into addiction and promiscuity; and the delusion that enveloped them all. She shines a remarkable, uncomfortable light on a familys disintegration and takes a searing look at a controversial financial time and also at herself, a child whose normal belonged only to the one percent. A rare, insiders perspective on the collateral damage of a fall from grace, After Perfect is a poignant reflection on the astounding pace at which a life can change and how blind we can be to the ugly truth.

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