"I can't possibly belong to these people. When are my real parents coming for me? Tonight, at the dinner table, Mom sent me to my room for talking too much. No freedom of speech in this house. So, I wrote a suicide note, folded it into a paper airplane and flew it into the kitchen."

With this entry, quoted from a childhood journal, Holly Schroeder Link, a self-described "wide-eyed midwestern girl on a lifelong quest for love, freedom, and fame," opens her memoir, Big Noise from LaPorte: A Diary of the Disillusioned.

Alternately absurd and profound, hilarious and thought provoking, Big Noise from LaPorte will feel achingly familiar to any actor, athlete, ballet student, musical prodigy, or budding chess master who ever had a mother or father to both guide their career and unwittingly sabotage their psyche.

And, to those tossed by fate's unexpected events—injury, illness, upheaval, and cruel revelation—Big Noise is something of an affirmation. Though a person's life doesn't always turn out as they'd imagined, it always turns out. Sometimes it even ends with a walk down the aisle.

A dreamer comes to terms with reality in this story of love, loss, trauma, and forgiveness.