A beautiful and bright young girl from suburbia turns adolescent druggie in a rebellion against her covertly narcissist mother and is next preyed upon by a dangerous cult that still operates across the globe today. Vada Broz spends ten years enduring psychological, physical, financial, and emotional manipulation that includes sexual coercion. Upon escaping the cult and the closet, she becomes a raging alcoholic until scraping calamity from the bottom of the barrel sobers her in its aftermath. Then a frenzied romantic partnership triggers her repressed memories from childhood and the floodgate of her traumatic past is lifted. Through a surge of flashbacks, she accepts that her mental state of dissociative amnesia was initiated by the abuse and neglect of her mother. Eager to put the fragmented and broken bits of her life together she writes a memoir. The skill and compassion of her psychotherapist help her navigate the symptoms of Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, and investigative conversations with people from her past provide her with the clarity and validation she seeks. Her experience with the public healthcare system, however, discloses an undercurrent of social privilege and oppression that perpetuates mental illness and its consequent acts of malice and violence. Vada Broz's debut as a writer traces the emergence of her human self who has been hiding and surviving for thirty-five years. Out of Character and the Dark is peopled with a myriad of personalities who are both friend and foe as Vada highlights the events that saved her from the dire repercussions of cruelty and oppression when the odds were starkly stacked against her. Her story features over fifty works of art to enrich her gripping experience as she pursues self-redemption.
