This Happened to Me

“Price not only rises above the hurt and hate, she uses her hard-won insights to shine a light for others.” – Jeannette Walls, #1 New York Times bestselling author

For readers of Educated, The Glass Castle, and Know My Name comes a powerful memoir that is a remarkable testament of survival and resilience. At once harrowing and exquisite, haunting and inspiring, Kate Price’s story will leave readers with a profound assurance in the power to heal.

Kate Price grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania with her sister and parents. Price was destined to leave, and in doing so, to break one of many, unwritten rules when it came to unbroken cycles of poverty, violence, addiction, mental illness, and abuse. She started a new life in Boston where she discovered the truth of her dark past through a series of hazy flashbacks accompanied by a “chilling of her blood and uncomfortable feeling in her bones.”

Overcome with unexplainable grief, she sought out Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a trauma specialist, to help her understand these flashbacks. Price discovered what that darkness that lay within her was – that her father had abused and trafficked her as a child. And so began a 10-year quest with a journalist from the Boston Globe, to prove what Price knew to be her truth. With many trips back to the hometown she thought she had left forever, the two eventually found the hard-earned proof Price had been searching for.

Now, in her exquisitely rendered, transformative memoir, Price describes how she broke free of that which had defined her childhood, to create a life and family on her own terms. From victim to advocate, from fearful child to empowered adult, and from despair to triumph, This Happened to Me is a story of astonishing resilience and breathtaking determination.

Author Biography

Kate Price is an Associate Research Scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women, a gender-based research institute at Wellesley College. She is also an alumni scholar at the Brandeis University Women’s Studies Research Institute and a senior research associate at a health and human services firm outside of Boston. Price received her master’s degree in Gender/Cultural Studies from Simmons College and earned her Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Price is an internationally recognized child sex trafficking expert whose work has influenced the passage of state-level children’s human rights legislation. Price’s work has been published in various scholarly journals and she is a member of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children Child Sex Trafficking Expert Working Group as well as a founding Advisory Board member of the U.S. branch of End Child Prostitution and Trafficking.

Price is the recipient of a Conrad N. Hilton Humanitarian Prize medal, a Mariam K. Chamberlain Dissertation Award from the International Centers for Research on Women and an American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellowship.