At age fifteen, Abigail Vona lived a life so far out of control (booze, boys, drugs, stealing, and runaway charges that her father committed her to Peninsula Village, a controversial treatment facility for “behavior modification” in Louisville, Tennessee. She was kept inside this “level-three lockdown” and “wilderness boot camp” for nearly a year. And though it all started as a nightmare, it eventually became her salvation.
An errant soul at war with the world and especially with herself, Vona unabashedly takes readers inside her own private Idaho. And while she negotiates the dangerous terrain of this “tough love” program, she reveals the many dark secrets of the Bad Girl sisterhood. Contending with various behavioral problems (sexual excess, violence, drug addiction, anorexia, self-mutilation, etc.) some of these girls succeed, while others must either continue serving their term, or worse, be kicked back to their desperate lives on the outside.
Vona’s tells her vivid story with a twelve-step, chapter-by-chapter descent to rock bottom, which arcs into a twelve-step, chapter-by-chapter ascent to a new way of seeing her life. Most controversial, Vona secured, and includes throughout the book, excerpts from her actual psychiatric “progress notes” to both underscore and belie her narrative.
A book that will resonate with young women and their mothers alike, Bad Girl is an Every Girl story of teenage rebellion and self-discovery, accelerated to the extreme.
Abigail Vona is from West Hartford, Connecticut. After being released from Peninsula Village, she attended the Forman School in Litchfield, Connecticut, a school serving students with learning disabilities such as ADD and dyslexia, graduating in May 2003. She is currently taking classes at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
An errant soul at war with the world and especially with herself, Vona unabashedly takes readers inside her own private Idaho. And while she negotiates the dangerous terrain of this “tough love” program, she reveals the many dark secrets of the Bad Girl sisterhood. Contending with various behavioral problems (sexual excess, violence, drug addiction, anorexia, self-mutilation, etc.) some of these girls succeed, while others must either continue serving their term, or worse, be kicked back to their desperate lives on the outside.
Vona’s tells her vivid story with a twelve-step, chapter-by-chapter descent to rock bottom, which arcs into a twelve-step, chapter-by-chapter ascent to a new way of seeing her life. Most controversial, Vona secured, and includes throughout the book, excerpts from her actual psychiatric “progress notes” to both underscore and belie her narrative.
A book that will resonate with young women and their mothers alike, Bad Girl is an Every Girl story of teenage rebellion and self-discovery, accelerated to the extreme.
Abigail Vona is from West Hartford, Connecticut. After being released from Peninsula Village, she attended the Forman School in Litchfield, Connecticut, a school serving students with learning disabilities such as ADD and dyslexia, graduating in May 2003. She is currently taking classes at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
