Christina McDowell's childhood was the stuff of fantasies: private jets, summers in Nantucket, a sprawling mansion in Virginia. It seemed a world impervious to suffering, so when her father was arrested for fraud while she was in college, she could not imagine the hellish chaos that would follow. He was a lawyer entangled with Jordan Belfort, the man whose story would inspire The Wolf of Wall Street. After Perfect is her story--the story of a daughter coping with her father's imprisonment, attempting to support herself as a cocktail waitress in Los Angeles's seedy nightclubs, and fighting her own downward spiral of denial and self-destruction.
Without sensationalizing her lifestyle (even after her father's arrest, her acquaintances included such celebrities as Emma Stone and Arianna Huffington), McDowell faces her past with an admirably rigorous level of criticism and self-awareness. She recalls how ill equipped for working she was, how crippled by shame. Only through connecting with fellow family members of the incarcerated did she eventually find the strength to move on and claim a new identity of her own.
In 2013, 10 years after her father's arrest, McDowell wrote an opinion piece for LA Weekly titled, "An Open Letter to the Makers of The Wolf of Wall Street, and the Wolf Himself." In it, she condemns the film for glossing over the suffering of those affected by crime--an issue she continues to be involved with in her community. She now volunteers with InsideOUT Writers, a nonprofit for children affected by the criminal justice system. --Annie Atherton