“I spent a lot of my youth wishing my mom was something she wasn’t, wishing she was like the other moms,” she once reflected. “I only really appreciated how special she was when I got older. In fact, maybe a little too late.”
“When she made a lot of money that night, we’d go grocery shopping at 2 a.m.,” the actress told People when her memoir was released.
“My childhood was colorful and chaotic… unstable and inconsistent, unpredictable and hard a lot of the time. But the silver lining is that it made me a very adaptable person,” she says.
To make ends meet, her mother once tried to smuggle drugs across the Mexico –U.S. border, but she was caught and spent time in jail. While her mother was incarcerated, the actress was sent to live with various friends and acquaintances. In one of those homes, she even experienced physical abuse.
By the time she was a teenager, she was fending for herself and started performing in peep shows at an Albuquerque adult-video store.
“I started with the scariest part,” she recalls. “The part I carried the most shame about… the part I hid my whole life. And I felt like that was where I had to be the bravest.”
Wanted to be a nurse
She later escaped a toxic relationship with her first boyfriend, a relationship that involved coercion and an abortion, before trying to reconnect with her estranged father, the former rock musician.Continue reading…
