When you grow up the way Regina Louise grew up -- abandoned by her parents, physically abused by caretakers, shuttled from foster home to foster home -- you learn to doubt your memories. Even the good ones, especially the good ones, come with a disclaimer: Maybe they never happened.
Louise remembered that a woman once wanted to adopt her. The woman took Louise to the ballet and opera, taught her to believe in herself, and made her a beautiful blue dress with rainbows and hearts stitched on the front.
Then the woman disappeared from her life.
By the time Louise, the successful owner of two Bay Area hair salons, sat down to write her memoir in 1999, she was 37, and none of the adults from her childhood who could corroborate her stories could be found.
The scars on her body told her she had been beaten. But did the blue dress ever exist? Was the love that deep? Maybe myth had mixed with memory. Maybe it never happened.
This is the inheritance sometimes left to children who leave foster care with no lasting bonds with adults: There is no one around to tell the kinds of stories that seed memories, stories that start with "Remember when you ... ?"
What she could recall, and what she felt, she wrote down. In the summer of 2003, Louise's memoir, "Somebody's Someone," arrived in bookstores. Though she did not know it then, writing about her dark past would alter her future in ways she had only dreamed about as a child.
Louise was a toddler when her biological mother left her in Austin, Texas, in the care of a woman who took in kids. Her father only vaguely knew she existed.
Louise was often mistreated. At the age of 11 she ran away to North Carolina to rejoin her mother, who did not want her. She was sent to Richmond, Calif., to be with her father, who also rejected her. She ended up in the foster care system.
In 1975, on the eve of her 13th birthday, Louise arrived at a children's shelter in the Bay Area city of Martinez. Jeanne Taylor worked at the shelter, and where others saw bad behavior in Louise, Taylor saw potential.
She nourished it with trips to the opera and ballet and by demonstrating to Louise her potential for good. When Louise showed up with Converse sneakers that she had stolen, Taylor made her return them. But mostly she made the girl want to behave.
