Hope Solo will soon release her autobiography Solo: A Memoir of Hope, and with it comes a candid look at the life of a world-famous Olympic athlete. NBC Olympics (h/t Larry Brown Sports) released an excerpt of the upcoming memoir, co-written by Ann Killion, and there are some startling admissions from a high-profile athlete who looks unfazed by pretty much anything on the pitch. The excerpts begin with a description of Solo’s childhood home—a happy household that lay behind a fence adorned with a giant happy face. Solo does well to state the huge smile wasn’t merely an extension of the love shared beyond the gate, but served a purpose as well. But as with so much of my life, the truth is a little more complicated. Clutter—plastic toys, yard equipment, bikes, an old jalopy—filled up our side yard. The neighbors complained, so my parents were forced to put up a fence to hide all our crap. My mom didn’t like thinking the neighbors had won some kind of victory, so she painted that garish yellow happy face as tall and as wide as the fence would allow. The smiley face wasn’t a reflection of internal happiness. It was a big “(expletive)* you” to our neighbors. The part of the excerpt that has the Internet abuzz is the beginnings of this soccer superstar. It always strikes me what we choose to pick out as interesting tidbits. The Internet seems to have chosen its highlight ahead of the book’s release. How did my father come to Richland? I wish I knew the entire answer to that question. Here’s part of the answer: my mother, who had moved to Everett, Washington, as a young woman, married my father and became pregnant with me during a conjugal visit while my father was serving a prison sentence in Washington. The far more interesting part is her father maintaining a relationship with a woman bizarrely named Judy Lynn, just like Solo’s mother, all through Hope’s childhood. The two families managed to maintain some level of normalcy, whatever that might mean to you. To me, it means there was mutual love among half brothers and half sisters unwilling to bring attention to the “half” in those titles. Though we had different mothers, the four of us shared my father’s DNA: piercing eyes, Italian coloring, intense emotions. David and Terry came to visit every summer, and sometimes went camping with us. Despite her father’s multiple families and the fact that he would come and go from her life, the world football star is accepting of who her father was when she was maturing. It’s the only thing that keeps her on an even keel when recalling her childhood. Yes, he was a ladies man. Yes, he was unreliable at best and a criminal at worst. If I hadn’t made peace with him later in my life, I’d still be bitter and angry. Hope Solo is a name known by many people the world over. Her fame is exactly what mandates she pen a book and tells us where she came from. The conclusion is the same as every autobiography ever written: We all come from different circumstances, every last one of them shape who we are. This is no different for the book that will come out August 14, making us intrigued for what Solo has to declare in the rest of those pages.