In "Mummy: A Journey Home," Darren Numer navigates the waters of sex, drugs and foster care. He brings the reader along on a heartbreaking ride from one foster home to another, through sexual discovery and awakening, into a 20-year drug addiction and the abrupt end of its grip on him.
After his earliest childhood memories with his sister and brothers in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Darren describes being yanked away from his mother by social workers at the age of 3, and dumped into state custody... then into the cold, institutional arms of the 1970s foster-care system.
Bouncing from a state-run shelter to a series of foster families, then back to the shelter, Darren sought the love and acceptance he craved... all the while striving to right the wrongs he saw in his little world.
The lone voice for a distressed classmate bullied by a power-hungry teacher, using his perceived super-hero powers to battle injustice in the last row of the second-grade classroom, standing up for two new sisters on the bus in middle school and using humor (and the power of outrageous song) to defuse tempers outside his home decades later, Darren proves himself to be part crusader, part Julie Andrews and part Mother Teresa.
After being diagnosed with scoliosis in his youth - and his foster mother's medical decision regarding his diagnosis that would change his life - Darren learned a series of lessons about life and perseverance that he still carries with him today.
His time as a teenage runaway taught Darren hard lessons on the streets... and harder lessons during bouts of panhandling, homelessness, jail and prostitution that followed.
Then came a move to L.A. and the relentless lure of the stage.
Hilarious auditions ensue and Darren describes them in elaborate and riotous fashion.
Mummy: A Journey Home is a tale of survival against - and triumph over - the bitterest of odds. And love that outlasts everything.
