What Lies Within

What Lies Within is a riches to rags to reality story that begins in New Jersey and portrays life in the 1950s and 1960s. Fathers worked, mothers ran the household, and children were allowed to be kids. This idyllic existence ended abruptly for the author when family secrets—including her adoption—were revealed. The comfortable life she knew rapidly dissolved and took her across the country to a strange new land called California. With this move came many personal losses during pivotal years in American history, when the Cuban missile crisis occurred, the civil rights movement arose, the Vietnam War grew, and assassinations abounded, taking the lives of a beloved U.S. president, his brother, and several civil rights leaders. These public losses paralleled the author’s personal losses, yet she never gave up. Atwater’s memoir is a tale of love, loss, hope, and resilience.