Moonshiner's Daughter is the early life story of a young girl raised in some of the most remote, backwoods parts of Haywood County, North Carolina, deep in the heart of the Great Smoky Mountains of Appalachia. Her father, a hard-drinking, ardent moonshiner when he wasn't in prison, and her mother, often showing mental illness from an earlier brain injury, raised their four children in some of the grimmest circumstances that you will ever read about. Both parents were extremely abusive during Mary's childhood and she also reveals the trauma she and her siblings suffered at the hands of teachers, principals and members of the community as a "dirt" poor child. When Mary's father was not able to moonshine by himself because of age, he took on an apprentice, Marvin "Popcorn" Sutton, as a teenager. "Popcorn" Sutton eventually made a name for himself using the skills he learned from Mary's father. Mary Judith Messer finally escaped her extreme living conditions by going to live with the Queen family as their mother's helper outside of Washington, DC in Alexandria, Virginia. She then moved to New York City to live with her older sister who had run away from a forced marriage to one of her father's drinking buddies. In New York, she was exposed to dingy, bed-bug infested apartments as well as the glamour of Radio City Music Hall and Broadway shows. She scrambled to earn a living as an underage teenager and discovered that not all the cruel people had been left behind in the North Carolina mountains.The memoir Moonshiner's Daughter is told through the eyes and with the words of a barely educated child and teenager yet their meaning and descriptions are clear as a mountain stream. She changed the names of most people and places she wrote about to protect her still living family members. The moonshiner's daughter did survive and ultimately thrive. This is her story. Although she was a successful businesswoman, wife and mother of three sons, Mary J. Messer was haunted by her poverty-ridden past. In slow times during her work day, she would sit down and scribble her memories of growing up in spiral bound notebooks. She filled these notebooks to overflowing, and put them away for five years. But she couldn't put it out of her mind that someone else might be able to benefit from reading about the horrors of what she went through, so she made an announcement on the local radio station, seeking someone to transcribe her notebooks and save to a computer disk. Eventually, she had a couple from South Carolina who took on the task of translating her "creative" spelling and Chinese chicken scratching that was her hand writing into manageable form. "I decided to write this book about my life because I just had to. All my life, I have had this burning in my heart about what happened to me and my siblings and no one had to pay for the crimes. Maybe by getting my story out, I will stop hurting. Even though I only had an eighth grade education, and a pretty spotty one at that, and the thought of me writing a book seemed impossible, I couldn't keep it inside." One of Mary's little charges when she was a mother's helper, Buffy Queen, now grown, then became her editor, got the manuscript into final form and helped her find a publisher. Please find other information at Mary's website: moonshinersdaughter.com.