Some life stories are so unique they demand to be told. But there was a time when Joh'Vonnie Jackson wasn't ready to share her truth. As the one child Joseph Jackson fathered out of wedlock, Joh'Vonnie experienced an oftentimes emotionally chaotic, underappreciated and uncelebrated life compared with those of her world famous kin, some of whom saw her very existence as a threat to their public image.

Fans of her iconic siblings were ever ready to go on the attack, as if she were an enemy of her own family. As she grappled with her father's complicated legacy and forged her own path as a mother, poet, designer and author, Joh'Vonnie came to understand her station in life and sense of value and worth equal in every way with this larger-than-life family.

Bastard Child is a bracingly honest memoir that will, for the first time, bring Joh'Vonnie and the honest, complicated and thoroughly American history of the Jackson family to the world as it has never been known before.