Adventures of a Misfit: A Memoir

Haunted by her hellish past as the school outcast and the distraught daughter of a war-bitten Austrian mother, Andrea leaves home to find the happiness she knew as a young child in the flowering meadows of Iowa. She is confronted with people from drug dealers to reverends to professors; with countless jobs dealing with the elderly, the mentally ill, animals, and cancer patients, with the black of night as she huddles against the seat of her car in abandoned campgrounds. And along the way, she dives head first into the flip side of the physical realm. Did she really take a walk with her guardian angel? It’s one adventure after the next as Andrea struggles to define herself in a world intolerant of “misfits.”

Also woven into the story are a meek and mild father, a harassing grandfather, a loony brother who assumes the personality of Mr. Spock from Star Trek, and a clandestine foe that takes up residence inside her own head: attention deficit disorder. The resultant composite offers both layman and mental health enthusiast an intimate look into the development of borderline personality traits in the style of an entertaining novel, not that of a dry case study. It depicts a very unusual yet understandable life. Who doesn’t want to be loved? These are ordinary feelings magnified to the level of total despair by extraordinary situations. They touch upon the very foundation of the human psyche. What stirs one, stirs us all.