Becoming Your Own Best Friend, with Janice Erlbaum

About This Episode

At 15, Janice Erlbaum gave her mother an ultimatum: take back the violent stepfather, and I'm leaving. Her mother took him back, and Janice walked out that night into New York City's shelter system. Twenty years after the publication of Girlbomb: A Halfway Homeless Memoir, Janice joins Mike to talk about life at Covenant House and in group homes in 1980s Manhattan, and how being told she was a "bad girl" pushed her to become one. She also talks about the teachers who saw something worth saving, and why writing the book honestly meant owning the harm she did, not only the harm done to her. She explains why readers still pass the book from mother to daughter, how the people she wrote about responded, and the one piece of advice she'd whisper to her teenage self and to everyone else: keep writing it down.

Key Takeaways

1. Leaving can be the healthiest choice a kid makes. Janice's split-second decision to walk out rather than live with violence made her life worse before it got better. She says it has served her well ever since.
2. Kids live down to the labels adults give them. In the group home, she was treated as homeless because she was "bad," so she set out to be the baddest bad girl there was. Many of the girls around her weren't runaways but "throwaways," including gay and trans kids thrown out by their families.
3. One adult who sees you can change everything. An overworked drama teacher cast her, unreliable as she was, as the lead in the spring play. She showed up every single day.
4. Honest memoir means owning your part. She had long told a story in which she was only the victim. To write Girlbomb truthfully, she went back to Covenant House and wrote about the violence and lies she took part in, too.
5. Catharsis feels terrible while it's happening. Janice compares the drafting process to vomiting: awful in the moment, a relief once it's out. She finally wrote the book once a stable relationship gave her the calm to sit still with it.
6. The truth can earn forgiveness. Old friends told her the book was hard to read, but "you didn't lie, you were fair." Some of them are glad that time in their lives has been memorialized.
7. Keep writing it down. Her advice for anyone, at any age: getting your thoughts onto the page creates enough distance to treat yourself with compassion and become your own best friend.

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