“Robbed of a Childhood, Raped by the System” author to speak at Amazon on Jan. 10

BY DENNIS GEISINGER

Sunny Love will have a booksigning on Jan. 10. (Photo by Dennis Geisinger)

“I wrote this book nine years ago when I was very angry,” said author Sunny Love near the out-set of a interview at the offices of Hennepin/Powderhorn Partners on 12th and Lake, a street-level outreach center that provides workspace for the motivational speaker/advocate/educator and Howe neighborhood resident. “I finished it in about a week,” Love said.

“Robbed of a Childhood, Raped by the System” not only recaptures the anger that fueled its rapid delivery into the world, it recounts the steps of an abused child and of a woman wrongfully tried for sexual crimes in her own community. This Thursday, Jan. 10, from 7 to 9 p.m., Amazon Bookstore, at 4755 Chicago Ave., will sponsor a book signing and reading by Love, the stripper and sauna worker who beat the odds, became a teacher and in the process, reclaimed her life.

Love is an excellent storyteller, largely because even in the most drastic of her circumstances, she demands her integrity and respect. She defends her choices as those of a young mother with no visible means of support doing the best she can for her children, and in the process she challenges onlookers to turn their own moral concepts of modern society back onto themselves. Her candor and unflinching admis-sions about her past life force the reader into an eye-to-eye con-frontation.

“If you have not lived the life and walked the walk,” explained Love of her graduation as a counselor and mentor to women in the community who have fallen through the same sort of cracks as she, “how can you give 100 per-cent to what you’re doing?”

“Robbed of a Childhood, Raped by the System” reproduces an experience that was so often shocking with a language that is so plainly rocking, so raw, that it comes alive with intensity. Love’s writing describes a point of view deceptively simple and homespun when telling of her rape by a step-brother in her Tennessee home at age six—to the later revelations of eyes unmistakably sophisticated and street-smart, as when point-ing out in a chapter called “The Fast Life.”

“Life in the fast lane was kicking, with plenty of time to see who could out-do the other— more women, more cars, boats and clothes. There was no end to their madness. The pimps and whores all thought they had it going on in Minnesota at that time in the early 1980s.”

Love’s Minnesota landscape is full of contrast. Besides introduc-ing her to the profits and pitfalls of the sex industry, the Twin Cities provided her first haven from a dysfunctional and abusive family and gave her the work experience and professional training that eventually opened the door to her freedom. It also conceived the threat to that free-dom, in the most literal sense, that threw her into a new exis-tence.

The book’s prelude to its last chapter is titled, “The Dirty Bust.” It tells the story of how Sunny put on trial under a trumped-up charge and then released after the arresting officer failed to show up in court during her testimony. Faced with further prosecution, Love writes she “mustered up the courage to find another profes-sion— and way of life.”

While attending North Minneapolis’ Summit Academy in the late 90s, Love watched a film that featured motivational speak-er, Les Brown, who inspires others by recounting how he overcame his low self-esteem and thereby engineered his own success.

“I decided, then and there, that’s what I wanted to do with my life,” said Love.

Today, as director of her own organization, Women Planting Seeds, Love draws from her own life experience, along with many hours of education and training, to bring hope to the lives of those coming out of domestic violence and correctional institutions. To those people and to those who are students of humanity’s struggle in an often-unforgiving life, “Robbed of a Childhood, Raped by the System” is a valuable primer.