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

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

Although her story has been told in many different ways, the new release marks the first time that the famous Munchausen stand-in victim takes the helm of her narrative 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’s been quite a roller coaster ride.”

From remembering the painful abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother Dee Dee and others to visiting her the night her mother was killed and her subsequent incarceration, Blanchard expresses it all.

About her time in prison, she shares shocking details of an experience that broke her spirit and almost her sanity.

“The county jail is a despicable place. “It was dirty and overcrowded, the food was expired and poisonous, and people were inconsiderate no matter what level they sat on,” she writes of her year-long stint in Missouri’s Greene County Jail. She later moved to the less harsh environment of the state correctional center Chillicothe, where she served eight years of her 10-year sentence.

Back at the county jail, “roommates came and went. “I never knew what the next naked lady would do,” she writes. After listing three notable cellmates who came through – one who howled at the moon; one who spoke to the wall; and one who hit her head while cursing under her breath – Blanchard describes another person who topped them all. This inmate, she writes, “loved to play in her own cabin.”

She explains in the book: “When you’re under this kind of surveillance, you don’t leave the cell. There is not even an hour of free time in a garden. We were only allowed one ten-minute phone call a day and one shower. So I had to watch my naked roommate enjoying her excrement almost all day.

Blanchard writes of a time when she had to intervene. “Once I had to bribe her to stop with the promise of, I don’t remember what, because the smell made me throw things around.” She adds that “when you think about it, the whole scene was unfair. Some of these people were so far gone that it was hard to believe they were conscious enough to commit a crime.”

To sum up her feelings: “I was horrified, confused and so trapped for four months,” she writes. And the experience led her to unimaginable despair. “For a few days I debated whether I should use my gown. I looked closely at the walls, around the bunk beds and the ceiling, looking for places high enough to tie him down.”

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

But, she adds, she is doing better.

“I think, okay, this was a part of my life, but this is just a part of me. This is how I became who I am today. Every facet of my personality, how I think, how I react to things, how I make judgments, is all based on what I have learned from the past.

My time to stand by Gypsy-Rose Blanchard, co-authored with Melissa Moore and Michele Matrisciani, will be published by BenBella Books on December 10th and is available for pre-order 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, texting “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741741 or going to 988lifeline.org .