Memoir · Out now
She was never meant to tell this story. So she wrote it down.
Orphaned at six months. A dancer at thirty. An author at eighty-three. Secrets Are Out Now is the whole of a life that refused to stay quiet.
“Eighty-three years, and not one of them wasted on pretending.”
From the author's note
The woman behind the pages
Detroit did not want her. The world got her anyway.
She was born in Detroit to a mother who tried to end the pregnancy, and orphaned before she could walk. A German family took her in at six months old. What followed — the assault at sixteen, eleven marriages, a body that kept moving when nothing else would — became a dancing career that began at an age most dancers retire.
At eighty-three she sat down and wrote all of it, without softening the parts that still hurt. Two memoirs, twenty-three years apart, telling one life the way it actually happened.
Read her full storyThe books
One life, told across twenty-three years
The first memoir opened the door. The second one walks all the way through it.
Secrets Are Out Now
How a girl overcomes the world — the full account, from an unwanted birth to a life reclaimed at eighty-three.
About this book
Someone Please Love Me
A true story of a dancer from the movie Porky's — the first telling, written more than twenty years earlier.
About this book
Speaking & Book Clubs
Talks on survival, reinvention and finding your voice long after the world stopped listening.
Booking details
Nobody kept my secrets for me. So I stopped asking them to.
Crystal Gellata
A life in chapters
Eighty-three years, unabridged
Every date below appears in the memoirs. Nothing here has been tidied for comfort.
The whole storyBorn unwanted
Her mother did not want the pregnancy and tried to end it. Crystal was born anyway.
Orphaned, then adopted
Left without parents before her first birthday, she was taken in by a German family.
The year she stopped being a child
An assault that the memoir refuses to skip over, and that shaped everything that followed.
She started dancing
A performing career began at the age most dancers are finishing — including an appearance in the film Porky's.
Singing with Beverly Sills
A season with the Palm Beach Opera, sharing a stage with one of America's great sopranos.
The first memoir
Someone Please Love Me is published — the dancer's story, told for the first time.
Secrets Are Out Now
At eighty-three, the complete account arrives from Brookscraft Publishing.
Why readers stay up late with it
Not an inspirational book. An honest one.
Told without flinching
The assault, the eleven marriages, the years she does not defend — all of it stays in.
Written at eighty-three
Far enough from the events to see them clearly, close enough to still feel every one.
A true story throughout
No composite characters, no invented scenes. Names, dates and places as they were.
It ends better than it starts
She is eighty-three, living well, and writing. That is the point of the whole book.
The archive
A life on stage, and on the page
Reader reviews
What people say after they finish it
In her own voice
Hear the story before you read it
Readings, interviews and conversations about the memoir, collected on her channel.
Visit the YouTube channel
Play video
Get in touch
Interviews, events, or just a note
Press enquiries, speaking bookings, book club visits and reader letters all arrive in the same inbox — and she reads them herself.
Out now
The secrets are out. You may as well read them.
Published 13 May 2026 by Brookscraft Publishing. ISBN 978-1-9696-8262-9.