When I Was Her Daughter

By: Leslie Ferguson

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

This award-winning work of narrative nonfiction is a raw and haunting account of one girl’s journey through madness, loss, and a broken child welfare system in Los Angeles in the 1980s.

Seven-year-old Leslie has a serious problem. Someone is trying to kill her.

Her mother Roberta suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, and she writes rambling manifestos and forces her children to live on the run to evade capture by the Russian spies she believes are after them.

With every psychotic break, Leslie and her younger brother face terrifying circumstances despite the fact that Roberta’s only wish is to protect them. Who will help them when she is convinced that killing them will save them from a worse fate?

When separated from her family and thrust into foster care for the foreseeable future, Leslie navigates a new kind of fear and loneliness. All she wants is to be loved, but how can her mother ever love her when she is so far away? How can she love her now that Leslie has betrayed her in so many ways? Will Leslie ever see her again?

Ultimately, Leslie remains at the mercy of the adults in her life who can effect change, and she wonders if she will ever find a safe place to land. Nobody will talk about her mother’s mental illness, and nothing seems to be able to fix her dysfunctional family. But her sixth-grade teacher gives her hope every day, so Leslie pretends she is—and always has been—her daughter.

An unbelievable true story of grit and heart, When I Was Her Daughter is, at its core, a tale about how the redemptive power of patience and courage leads to unconditional love for a lost and angry child desperate to understand where she belongs.