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Tavis: All right, the next time you think you have obstacles in your life that you cannot overcome, consider the story of Cupcake Brown. At age 11, she was regularly engaged in prostitution, drugs, and alcohol. That's right, 11. Two years later, gangs and crime. Before she's 15, she's shot in a drive-by shooting, and told she might never walk again.

But Cupcake Brown fought her way out of a seemingly bottomless pit, made her way through law school, and now practices law at one of the nation's premiere law firms. Her incredible and inspirational story told in the new memoir, 'A Piece of Cake.' Now, I'd be called sexist for calling any other Black lawyer in the country Cupcake, but hey, Cupcake.

Cupcake Brown: (Laugh) Hi, sweetie. (Laugh)

Tavis: (Laugh) I got a sweetie out of that. All right, so we're both being sexist, then. But I'm cool with that. Nice to have you on the program.

Brown: It's an honor to be here.

Tavis: I'm honored to have you. This is a remarkable story, and I've had the pleasure over the years of doing radio and television of talking to a lot of people who I think have had some remarkable stories of overcoming. And the truth of the matter is, in the Black experience, certainly, we all have stories of overcoming.

So in that regard, your story, nobody's story is particularly unique. But yours is unique in the sense that you were met with tragedy and challenged at such a young age. And I say all that because this has been the most difficult conversation for me to have, in part because I don't know where to begin. Your story is so phenomenal from day one.

I guess the place to start is probably where the book starts. Which is the death of your mother from swallowing her tongue in an epileptic seizure. Tell me what you remember about this.

Brown: Well, I woke up, I was 11 years old. I woke up; her alarm clock radio woke me up. And she normally woke me up. So when the alarm clock woke me up, that startled me. And I walked into her room, and I found her laying on her bed, on her stomach, half of her body hanging over. And she had long hair, like me, so her hair was hanging down in her face.

I tried to lift her up, and she slid off the bed onto me. And she had had a seizure, and during that seizure, she had dislodged her tongue and suffocated from it.

Tavis: So you're 11.

Brown: I'm 11.

Tavis: What happens after your mother passes away?

Brown: Well it's funny. Up until my mom died, I actually had a very good childhood. I lived in the ghetto, but it was still, there's nothing to be ashamed about. And so I was loved, very sheltered, extremely supported. And once my mom died, the man that I thought was my daddy, the man I called "Daddy" I discovered was my stepdad. He'd been my dad since I was two years old.

My biological father, who disappeared when I was about two months old, reappeared. Because he thought whoever got my brother and I could get some life insurance money that my mom left us. And so he showed up, and a custody battle ensued, and he was given custody as a biological parent. And he put me in foster care. And in foster care, I was raped and beaten.

Tavis: He put you, back up, though. He put you in foster care, though, let's be true to the story, only after he realizes there ain't no money yet.

Brown: Well, actually, he never really planned to keep us, because the foster mother was waiting when we left the courthouse. So whether he would have gotten the money or not, she was waiting to take us.

Tavis: But his plan was to get the money and ship ya'll off to foster care.

Brown: Correct.

Tavis: Okay. So you end up in foster care after all.

Brown: Yes.

Tavis: All right. So foster care is where the troubles really begin.

Brown: Correct. Correct. In foster care, I was raped repeatedly by her nephew, a man named Pete. And I was beaten. The foster mother's name was Diane, and Diane was sadistically evil. And she didn't like herself, now that I'm older, I know that. And she didn't like children. And so, the abuse, there was physical abuse, verbal abuse, emotional abuse, and I had never been exposed to any of that. And so I ran away.

Tavis: I don't wanna indict the entire foster care system, but I wonder, as a lawyer now, and as you've gotten, there's more story to get to, so I don't wanna move too fast. But as you've gotten older now, now that you are an accomplished lawyer, whether or not, in retrospect, or even now, your views of foster care are uniquely different from the rest of us.

The system. I don't mean to cast aspersion on everybody in that system. The system has a lot of good people in it. But these kinds of stories of people abusing the foster care system ain't new, as you well know. We hear them all the time.

Brown: Exactly, exactly. Children are still being abused, and even killed under the system. So you're right. There are some good foster parents out there, but the system still needs dire improvement.

Tavis: Yeah. So you're in this foster care system for how long?

Brown: Until I was 16.

Tavis: Sixteen. So you're in foster care, and you're being raped, you're being beaten. The foster family you live with, the mother doesn't really want kids or like kids to begin with. I assume for her, it was a money thing as well.

Brown: Exactly.

Tavis: All right, so everybody around you wants money.

Brown: Exactly.

Tavis: All right. Let's fast forward to you're 13. Now you find yourself I guess looking for a family, looking to be loved, and you run into what a lot of people run into, a lot of kids run into these days, an opportunity to hang out with some gang members.

Brown: Exactly. 'Cause by the time I was 13, I had been in and out of several foster homes. And so I was really looking for love and a family environment. When I was 13, I was in a home in south central Los Angeles, where I was staying with a great aunt. And my cousin was already in the gang, so he brought me into the gang. And the gang was the closest thing to a family that I had. If I was hungry, they fed me. If I was cold, they gave me a jacket.

Tavis: Aside from the fact, it's a brilliant point, and I don't wanna diminish it or belittle it. I understand the need for love, we all want that. Somebody on this program said to me once that we all want three things. To be loved, to be appreciated, and given some respect. So I understand that. But at 13, as a 13, 14, 15, as a young girl, what made you think that the gang lifestyle was appropriate for a young girl? What pulled you into that?

Brown: Well again, it was the unconditional love. Being an adolescent is already difficult. You have peer pressure, and you're too short, too tall, too something. In a gang, they don't care. All you gotta be is down. We don't care what you look like; we don't care about any challenges...

Tavis: Even as a girl back then?

Brown: Even as a girl.

Tavis: We see a lot of gang members today who are girls, but I was just taken aback by the book that you got pulled in back then as a 13, 14 year old.

Brown: Exactly, and there were quite a few female gang members in my gang. And so, it was just the unconditional love. It's the same thing that pulls in the boys. It's the same thing that's attractive to all kids. The unconditional love, the camaraderie, the protection. If you mess with one of us, you mess with all of us.

Tavis: Fast forward, again, I'm trying to move through in 10 minutes a wonderful, wonderfully written book by Cupcake Brown. Let me, I should back up right quick. The name Cupcake. I should have started with this. But there's so much in this text. But I love how you got the nickname Cupcake.

Brown: Thank you.

Tavis: Yeah, tell the story.

Brown: My mom craved cupcakes when she was pregnant with me, and she had three a day, every day for nine and a half months. When she had me, she was heavily sedated. And so they told her she had a girl. Did she know what she wanted to name her? And she said Cupcake and passed out. So that's what they put down.

It was later discovered that she was asking for a cupcake. She wasn't naming me. Now, the story my mom told me is when my daddy came to the hospital, he didn't like Cupcake, and so he had them change the birth certificate. Now fast forward 12 years, I'm in the back of a van being molested by my foster father, and it occurs to me that when Mom said my daddy changed my name, she couldn't have meant the daddy that I know, because he was my stepdad.

She had to mean my biological father, who was the direct result of me being in this van, being molested. So I decided that that man did not have the right to change my name.

Tavis: The name he had changed it to was LaVette.

Brown: Was LaVette.

Tavis: LaVette.

Brown: And so I changed it back to Cupcake, the original name my mother had given me.

Tavis: And obviously, after all these years, you're still cool with that name.

Brown: I'm still cool with that name.

Tavis: And everybody at the law firm and in court calls you Cupcake Brown?

Brown: That's true. It's my legal name now.

Tavis: Yeah. (Laugh) I'm just laughing, in a court of law, the attorney says, all right, Cupcake. (Laugh) Next witness. Anyway, I digress on that. You're 15 now, and I mentioned at the top of this show by 15, you'd been shot in the back, almost 15. You're shot in the back twice, and told you may never walk again. How does this happen?

Brown: Correct. I'm almost 16.

Tavis: Yeah, I'm sorry, almost 16.

Brown: I'm celebrating my upcoming sixteenth birthday, and I was standing out partying in south central, and a rival gang drove by, and I was shot in a drive-by shooting. And I was hit with two guns. A sawed-off 12 gauge and a .22.

Tavis: You end up in the hospital, obviously. What do you remember about, when you talk about this in the book, in one of the more moving pieces in the book, of what you do, in fact, recall the vow that you did make. The commitment that you did make, once you found yourself lying on your back in a hospital bed.

Brown: That was the first time in my life I had ever talked to God. 'Cause I didn't know God, I wasn't born; I wasn't raised in a religious family. We weren't spiritual in any kind of way. So everything I knew about God, I heard from other people. And I knew that God had a foresight, so I knew that he had to know that if he had taken my mom, all these horrible things would happen to me.

So I figured he must not like me very much. So I decided if he didn't like me, I didn't like him. And I pretty much left him alone until the day in the hospital. And I made a deal with God. I didn't know if he could hear me, or if he even existed, but my prayer was if he let me walk out the hospital, I would get out the gang.

And I did. Three weeks later, I walked out, and they couldn't find a home in L.A. to take me, and so I was returned to the original foster mother in a neighboring city, Lancaster. And that's how I got out of the gang.

Tavis: Take me back to that hospital moment. I'm trying to understand how it is, after 15 years, almost 16 years of your believing that if there is a God, he must not like you very much because he would not have allowed all this to happen to you, and then in that one moment, you decide to talk to this being known as God.

This being we call God. Do you recall what convinced you, aside from the bullets in your back, what convinced you at that moment to even try to talk to this spirit being that you didn't even believe existed? Or if he did exist, or she did exist, they weren't down with your struggle.

Brown: Right. Well, a little voice inside told me to try God. And this was the same voice that I thought, I had always thought was intuition. It was the same voice that would tell me, "Don't get into this car; don't go down that street." That little voice said, "Why don't you try God?" And so as I was talking to the voice, I thought, well, I don't even know if God existed.

And I thought, well, if he does, he must be like everybody else. He doesn't do something for nothing. So that's when I thought I had to make him a deal. I'll give you something, you give me something. So, you let me walk, I get out the gang. And I wasn't even sure when I said the prayer if he heard me, or if it was even going to be answered. But I figured what the heck, give it a try.

Tavis: See, when I read the book, that's when I knew you were going to law school. You're trying to cut deals with God, you do this for me, we'll negotiate this out. (Laugh) I said, aw, she's going to law school, all right. (Laugh) That said, as you've gotten older, how have you processed how God allowed that, permitted that to happen to you? It's one thing to try to figure it out as a 16 year old. As an adult, how do you reconcile your faith and that experience now?

Brown: Well it's funny. When I got sober, there was still a lot of anger with God, and a lot of anger. And I had a lot of questions. Why? Why my mom had to die, why I had to be raped, why, why, why? And my sponsor, who's like a mentor, she told me that I shouldn't question God why it had to happen, but instead I should be grateful that I was brought through it.

So in other words, I was told I shouldn't put a question mark where God put a period. And so instead of trying to figure out why all these things happened, I just decided to exert gratitude for having come through it, and having been made a better person by surviving it.

Tavis: You did a lot of drugs along the way.

Brown: A lot of drugs.

Tavis: Just about everything except heroin.

Brown: No, I did heroin. Except ecstasy.

Tavis: Except ecstasy. See, I told you, a lot of stuff in this book, trying to keep it all straight. (Laugh) Everything except ecstasy, and your reason for not doing that was you figured as long as you didn't do ecstasy, you weren't really a drug addict. You weren't really hooked.

Brown: No, actually, I had never heard of it. I've been sober over 16 years. If I had heard of it, oh, I'd have done it.

Tavis: You would have done it, okay.

Brown: And even now I think, I wonder what that's like?

Tavis: Yeah. Why have that thought now?

Brown: Because after drinking and using for so many years, my mind, it still thinks like an addict sometimes. Like on a really, really hot day, my mind will think, man, a cold beer would sure be nice today. And so what I do is I play the tape all the way through. There are tools that I use to help not pick up a drink or a drug, but to think that after all these years of drinking and using, you would never think about drinking and using is actually abnormal. And so I still think about it. I just don't do it.

Tavis: You know what's weird bout that, and maybe weird is the wrong word, but it strikes me this way, that after all that you have been through and all that you've endured, and here's when you know that this is a disease that you have to fight with every day, and I understand it before I even ask the question or make the statement.

But it is funny, ironic to me, at least, that after all that you've endured, that that thought would ever enter your mind, ever. The fact that you're honest enough to say, I wonder what that would be like? I don't even know how a thought like that enters one's mind who has endured all of this, and come out all right.

Brown: Oh yeah.

Tavis: That's fascinating to me.

Brown: The thought still comes. Sometimes, automobile exhaust smells like crack. And I'll go oh, that smells good. But again, I play the tape all the way through, I pray, I get on the phone and share about it. So I take the power out of it. There are tools that I use. But you're right, I work on staying clean and sober every day. Even 16 years later, I still work on not picking up a drink or a drug.

Tavis: That's amazing. All right, so now I gotta fast forward one last time. (Laugh) This is a big fast forward. 'Cause now you're sitting here, as I mentioned earlier, as a lawyer in one of the biggest firms in the country. And I'm fascinated, as I expect everybody else is, how that happened. How did you get from here to here?

Brown: Well, I still don't have to this day a high school diploma or a GED. And I had been sober about a year, and I was bored. Sobriety was boring to me. Street life is exciting. I was bored, and so I went to my sponsor again and I said, 'This sobriety stuff is not working for me.' (Laugh) And she said, 'What is it.' 'Because it's boring.' (Laugh)

Tavis: I'm bored with sobriety.

Brown: (Laugh) (unintelligible)

Tavis: I've been almost dead about 25 times, and this living clean really bores the heck out of me.

Brown: (Laugh) It was, it was boring.

Tavis: All right, go ahead.

Brown: And so she said, what is a dream that drugs and alcohol stole from you? And it took me a while to figure it out, but when I was a little girl, I had cross-examined my daddy on Santa Claus. I forced him to tell me there was no Santa Claus. And so ever since then, he told me I should be a lawyer. And so, that was the dream I had when I was little, but you fast forward, dope fiends, drunks, prostitutes, they don't become lawyers.

And so I remembered the dream, and so she asked me what was the dream that drugs and alcohol stole from me, and I told her about the dream of being a lawyer. And she told me to steal it back. And I said, well, what do you mean, steal it back? And how do you do that? She said, well, how do people become lawyers? They go to school.

She said, "Take your butt to school." And so, I went down to the community college to talk to the counselor, and the community college in San Diego has an adult extension. And so I went to the community college to find out how to get into the adult extension so I can get my GED. And the counselor said, well, what do you wanna do?

And I said, I think I wanna go to law school. And he said, no law school's gonna ask you where you went to high school. He said, so I wouldn't waste my time. I would start right here at community college. And so, I said okay, I'm here for advice, so I started at community college. Community college in a two-year program.

It took me five and a half years to get through it, and I graduated with honors, and then I transferred to San Diego State. And when they accepted me, I called them up and I said, "I don't have a high school diploma or a GED." And they said, "That's okay; you have an associate's degree." So you come in as a transfer student as a junior.

And so I went to San Diego State, and in three years, full time, graduated magna cum laude. And then applied to law schools and got into the University of San Francisco.

Tavis: You just went right on past that graduated magna cum laude.

Brown: (Laugh) I did. And when I graduated magna cum laude, I didn't even know what that meant. 'Cause we don't sit around the dope house saying, so and so graduated magna.

Tavis: Yeah. (Laugh)

Brown: So I had never heard the phrase before. They had to explain to me what that meant. 'Cause I wasn't trying to graduate with high honors. I was just trying to graduate. And so, then I got accepted to law school and went to law school. Spent the entire first year in the top 10 percent of the class, and passed the California bar exam the first time.

Tavis: Which is impossible. (Laugh)

Brown: Yes. (Laugh)

Tavis: Passing the bar the first time, impossible. So, I'm out of time, and I regret that. You've written a whole book about it. Is there, for you, a lesson here? There are a lot of lessons here, but what's the lesson for you of what you've been able to accomplish thus far? You still got a lot more to do.

Brown: The lesson for me is the advice that I give to everyone, and that is that God makes the impossible possible, so there are no excuses but you.

Tavis: Couldn't have said it better myself, and that's why she wrote the book. 'A Piece of Cake.' 'A Piece of Cake,' a memoir by Cupcake Brown. I am delighted to have you on this program, and I apologize to all those watching tonight. There's so much in this book, and I promise you, if I have ever scratched the surface of a book, or just barely touched the surface, this would be the text.

So you'll forgive me for not getting nowhere near what you will find in this text. And go pick up a copy of 'A Piece of Cake' by Cupcake Brown. I'm delighted to have you on the program. Nice to meet you.

Brown: Thank you, it's an honor to be here.

Tavis: Pleasure's all mine. That's our show for tonight. You can catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International, check your local listings. See you back here next time on PBS. Until then, good night from L.A. Thanks for watching, and keep the faith.