Gypsy-Rose Blanchard Recalls Feces-Loving Cellmate and Suicidal Thoughts (Exclusive)

Nothing is off limits in Gypsy-Rose Blanchard’s gripping new memoir.

Though her story has been told in many ways, for the first time, the famed victim of Munchausen by proxy gets behind the wheel of her narrative in the newly-released My Time to Stand: A Memoir.

“You want to do your story [justice],” she tells PEOPLE of her writing process in an exclusive interview this week. “You want to tell it with as much honesty and vulnerability as possible. So it was quite a rollercoaster ride.”

From revisiting the painful abuse she suffered at the hands of her mom Dee Dee and others, to going inside the night her mom was killed and her ensuing incarceration, Blanchard puts it all out there.

As for her time in prison, she relays shocking details of an experience that broke her spirit and nearly her sanity.

“County jail is a despicable place. It was dirty and crowded, the food was expired and toxic, and the people were ruthless, no matter the tier they were on,” she writes of being housed in Missouri’s Greene County Jail for a year before later moving to the less rough environment of the state’s Chillicothe Correctional Center, where she served eight years of her 10 year sentence.

Back in the county jail, “Roommates came and went. I never knew what the next naked lady would do,” she writes. After listing off three notable cellmates who passed through — one who howled at the moon; one who talked to the wall; and one who’d strike her own head while cursing to herself — Blanchard describes yet another who trumped them all. This inmate, she writes, “liked to play in her own poop.”

She explains in the book that “when you are under this type of watch, you don’t leave the cell. There isn’t even one hour of rec time in a yard. We only were allowed one ten-minute phone call a day and one shower. So, pretty much all day long, I was forced to watch my naked roommate delight in her excrement. As if it were Play-Doh, y’all.”

Blanchard writes of a time she had to intervene. “One time I had to bribe her to stop, promising I don’t remember what, because the stench made me hurl.” She adds that “the whole scene, upon reflection, was unjust. Some of these people were so far gone, it was hard to believe they were cognizant enough to commit any crime.”

To sum up her emotions, “I was horrified, confused, and trapped like this for four months,” she writes. And the experience led her to unimaginable despair. “For a few days, I wondered if I should put my smock to use. I looked closely on the walls, around the bunk beds, on the ceiling, for high enough places I could tie it to.”

Today, Blanchard says it wasn’t easy going back to moments like this for the book. “It raised a lot of emotions,” she tells PEOPLE, “and I brought it up with my therapist. I had to reopen the wounds, then go back into therapy and then heal them again.”

But, she adds, she’s better for it.

“I’m like, okay, that was a part of my life, but that’s just part of me. That’s how I became who I am today. Every facet of my personality, how I think, how I react to things, how I make judgments, it’s all based on what I have learned from the past.”

My Time to Stand by Gypsy-Rose Blanchard, co-authored by Melissa Moore and Michele Matrisciani comes out from BenBella Books on Dec. 10 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988, text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 or go to 988lifeline.org.