FELICIA 'SNOOP' PEARSON: I'm Not Making Excuses

When Felicia Pearson was born, the doctors had to use an eye-drop to feed her because her mouth was too small for a bottle's nipple. Her mother was addicted to drugs and Pearson, as she writes in an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, was a "A baby born to die."

Felicia "Snoop" Pearson is best known as the killer named after herself on The Wire, a character who Steven King declared "...the most terrifying villain to ever appear in a television series."

The role she plays isn't a stretch from the former life she lead growing up in a murderous neighborhood in Baltimore. She was into drug slinging and guns and eventually wound up in prison for second-degree murder. Her life is not a television show.

In November, Grand Central Publishing will release her memoir, GRACE AFTER MIDNIGHT (written with David Ritz), which promises to chronicle her "hardknock life story" including her birth as a three-pound preemie, being raised in a foster home, her transition into the streets, her prison bid, her rise to stardom, and as the book's title implies, her path to redemption.

I received a short excerpt from the memoir at this year's BookExpo. It's both horrifying and compelling. She recounts the last time she was allowed to spend time alone with her mother. Pearson was living at a foster house with the people who eventually adopted her. Naturally, she still wanted to see and be with her mother. When she got the opportunity to visit her mother's house alone (their visits were usually at a park and with a social worker), her mother was noticeably different. Crying and shaking. Her mother demanded that Pearson remove her clothes and pushed her daughter into the closet. Pearson screamed and kicked for an undetermined amount of time before the social worker and her foster parents rescued her. Pearson's mother sold her daughter's clothes to buy crack.

In the memoir's excerpt, Pearson writes that she's not making excuses or feeling sorry for herself. And she doesn't expect us to feel sorry for her either. She admits that things have turned around for her and she wants kids, especially the ones on the streets and working the corners, to know her story. They will in November.