Margo Perin

The idea that helping other people to express themselves through writing would bring her catharsis was never really on Margo's radar, but when she began teaching creative writing and poetry in prisons she found that she really identified with the incarcerated, powerless men and women she was working with - because that's how she'd felt as a child. Her parents had been her jailers.

"The violent men were letting me see the humanity inside them, and that was very comforting," she says. "I felt loved by them, and I never got that from my father." Not only was she helping the prisoners come to terms with their pasts through their writing, she was coming to terms with her own.

Helping others to overcome trauma has become the central point of her teaching. Personal stories of healing are also at the heart of her three published books.

Processing her childhood has taken Margo years - she's had decades of therapy - and it's a work in progress. But her father was a sociopath and she's not like him, nor "twisted" like her mother. As her therapist keeps telling her, she's nothing like the two people who brought her into this world.

"I have a very loving relationship, I'm not violent and I don't rip people off," says Margo, who returned to the US in 1986. "I should look back on my life and feel good about myself and everything I've achieved in spite of them."

Margo Perin is the author of an autobiographical novel, The Opposite of Hollywood
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-49397198