As I Lay Me Down to Sleep

A devastating true story of neglect and abuse

Eileen Munro is a trained photographer and a committed campaigner, publicist and feature writer for the UK brain injury charity Headway. She has addressed a cross-party committee of the Scottish Parliament investigating the extent of child sexual abuse in Scotland. She lives in South Lanarkshire and is currently studying creative writing through Open University. 
 
Carol McKay teaches creative writing with the Open University and her fiction has appeared in literary magazines, including Chapman and Mslexia. In 2002, she was a finalist in the prestigious Macallan/Scotland on Sunday Short Story Competition and in 2007 an extract from her work-in-progress novel was shortlisted in the Daily Telegraph Novel in a Year competition.

When Eileen Munro's mother became pregnant at 16, she was told to give her baby away to a 'good family', but the couple who paid the fee at the Salvation Army mother-and-baby home in Glasgow in 1963 turned out to be alcoholics who neglected and physically abused Eileen. Then, when their marriage broke down, they failed to protect her from sexual abuse at the hands of a family friend. 
 
After watching her adoptive mother drown on inhaled vomit, Eileen and her younger sister were taken into care, but her nightmare was to continue as she was subjected to further physical, sexual and emotional abuse. 
 
At the age of only seventeen, seven months into a secret pregnancy, she decided that the only way out was through a bottle of painkillers; when she survived and gave birth to a beautiful baby boy, he became her lifeline.

Eileen Munro

A moving testimony that exposes the shameful farce which passed for care in Scotland. Munro engages the reader with devastating honesty and humour, capturing tenderly the range of emotions that motherhood brings, aligned with a passionate quest to trace her roots and find her birth mother. A compulsive read

Sandra Brown OBE, author of Where There is Evil

In her bestselling memoir As I Lay Me Down to Sleep, Eileen Munro vividly documented the abuse she experienced at the hands of her adoptive parents and, later, within the care system. The birth of Eileen's son, Craig, and her escape from the authorities' clutches should have seen her turn a corner, but she remains haunted by the spectre of her past. 
 
In If I Should Die Before I Wake, Eileen chronicles her search for her real parents and her battle for an education for both Craig and herself. She faces exploitation, suffers further sexual and physical abuse, and endures periods of homelessness and bad health. Still she perseveres, clinging to her hopes for the future, until she eventually finds the sense of belonging that has previously eluded her. 
 
In this harrowing but ultimately inspirational second volume of memoir, Eileen Munro proves that, against all the odds, happiness does sometimes come to those who never give up hope.

Eileen Munro

Praise for If I Should Die Before I Wake

A moving testimony that exposes the shameful farce which passed for care in Scotland. Munro engages the reader with devastating honesty and humour, capturing tenderly the range of emotions that motherhood brings, al ...

Books by Eileen Munro

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