Politics & Prose at Busboys and Poets presents Christina McDowell discussing her memoir After Perfect.
When Tom Prousalis was convicted in 2005 as a co-conspirator of Jordan Belfort, the “Wolf of Wall Street,†it might have seemed that justice had been served. But for his family, the trauma of the betrayal didn’t end with Prousalis’s imprisonment. His then-nineteen-year-old-daughter Christina was hit hard by shame, anger, and the material consequences of her father’s downfall, and her memoir is a chronicle of homelessness, substance abuse, and depression, but also of gradual recovery. Moving geographically and emotionally away from the Northern Virginia of her difficult coming-of-age, McDowell has changed her name, lives in LA, and is active with InsideOUT Writers, a nonprofit for children impacted by the criminal justice system.