**New York Times Bestseller**From Erin French, owner of the critically acclaimed The Lost Kitchen, a Time world dining destination, a life-affirming memoir about survival, renewal, and finding a community to lift her up.Long before The Lost Kitchen became a world dining destination with every seat filled the day the reservation book opens each spring, Erin French was a girl roaming barefoot on a 25-acre farm, a teenager falling in love with food while working the line at her dad's diner and a young woman finding her calling as a professional chef at her tiny restaurant tucked into a 19th century mill. This singular memoir-a classic American story-invites readers to Erin's corner of her beloved Maine to share the real person behind the ""girl from Freedom"" fairytale, and the not-so-picture-perfect struggles that have taken every ounce of her strength to overcome, and that make Erin's life triumphant. In Finding Freedom, Erin opens up to the challenges, stumbles, and victories that have led her to the exact place she was ever meant to be, telling stories of multiple rock-bottoms, of darkness and anxiety, of survival as a jobless single mother, of pills that promised release but delivered addiction, of a man who seemed to offer salvation but in the end ripped away her very sense of self.