The Ones Who Partied with Me Were Never Really with Me
Imagine a girl who grew up in a stable, loving home, was a Girl Scout, a soccer player, and a proud member of her high school marching band. Her parents were supportive, her father a recovered alcoholic, her mother steady and present. There was no violent home, no sexual abuse, no generational curse that foreshadowed disaster. And yet… she fell.
From Marching Band to The Glass Rose is not a tidy memoir with a neat moral. It is a collection of journals, raw, fragmented, and brutally honest, that traces how an ordinary girl, Kristin Stanton, slipped into alcoholism, heroin, cocaine, and a life on the streets. She wrote about rehabs and jail cells, bad-boy lovers who promised safety and delivered violence, and nights spent trading her body to survive. According to Kristin, she slept with hundreds of men. Her entries were at once self-aware and self-condemning: she saw the patterns that pulled her under even as she kept falling.
These are not the embellished stories of a sensationalized memoir. These are uncensored journals of a woman navigating her own destruction. The author edited her writings slightly to clarify the narrative, but the heart of the story remains Kristin’s: fragmented, messy, and painfully authentic.
The power of Kristin’s story lies not just in the horror of addiction or the brutality of life on the streets. It lies in the humanity behind the chaos, the small moments of self-awareness, the fleeting glimmers of hope, and the stubborn will to keep moving even when the world seemed determined to break her.
She wrote of abusive “bad boy” boyfriends, of nights on the streets, of fear and survival. And through it all, there was an echo of resilience. Not the triumph of fairy tales, not a neat ending, but the gritty persistence of someone refusing to vanish entirely into the darkness.
From Marching Band to the Glass Rose is a warning, a reflection, and a challenge. Kristin’s story is a mirror, one that forces readers to confront the choices, circumstances, and vulnerabilities that can lead an ordinary life into extraordinary peril. It is a story of survival, perhaps, but never a story whose ending can be fully predicted.
This book is for those who seek the truth behind addiction, survival, and the raw human struggle. It is for readers drawn to memoirs that do not flinch, that refuse to soften the edges, and that dare to show the real cost of self-destruction.
The ones who partied with her were never really with her. And through her journals, we come to understand the depth of that loneliness and the fragility, and ferocity, of a life lived on the edge.
Read her story now on Amazon.
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