Gypsy-Rose Blanchard Recalls Shooting Mom with BB Gun, Being Chained to Bed in New Book: Read an Excerpt (Exclusive)

The famed Munchausen by proxy victim details "the last straw" that she says led her to murder in a chilling excerpt from 'My Time to Stand,' available Dec. 10

It's a crime that has captivated America for the better part of a decade, but for the first time, the woman at the center of it is telling her own story in her own words.

Gypsy-Rose Blanchard, famed victim of Munchausen by proxy who was convicted of second-degree murder for her part in the brutal 2015 killing of her mother DeeDee, is about release her side of the chilling story with her new memoir My Time to Stand, co-authored by Melissa Moore and Michele Matrisciani and available from BenBella Books on Dec. 10.

Though the sad circumstances of her early life have been shared many times over, most notably in 2019's hit Hulu drama series The Act as well as on Lifetime's 2023 documentary The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard, never before has Blanchard put pen to paper in this level of gripping detail, owning her own narrative.

"It brings me a lot of pride and joy to have this exciting moment," Blanchard tells PEOPLE in an exclusive interview ahead of the book's release. This moment is also, "nerve-wracking, it's stressful. You want to do your story [justice], you want to tell it with as much honesty and vulnerability as possible. So it was quite a rollercoaster ride."

Related: Gypsy Rose Blanchard, Set to Be Freed From Prison, Regrets Murdering Mother: 'She Didn’t Deserve That' (Exclusive)

Nearly a year after being released from Missouri's Chillicothe Correctional Center, where she spent 8 years of a 10 year sentence for conspiring to murder her mother with ex-boyfriend Nicholas Godejohn, the 33-year-old parolee and internet sensation is happily dating Ken Urker and preparing to become a mother herself. Her happy life now is a far cry from the pain and suffering she once endured at the hands of her mother and numerous medical professionals duped into putting her through years of unnecessary medical procedures.

Here, in an exclusive extended excerpt shared with PEOPLE, she looks back on the time when she felt she had no way out, and the moment that led her to do the unthinkable.

When Dee Dee Blanchard was 24 years old, she gave life to me. When I was nearly 24 years old, I took life from her. I firmly believed that by doing so, I was saving the life she had guarded with all her might: mine. Though she certainly saw my life as “ours,” at best. We’re two sides of the same penny, she liked to say, meaning: although two things may look very different and be diametrically opposed, they’re actually inseparable, two parts of the same whole.

After being incarcerated for eight and a half years, I’ve been learning how to navigate life on my own ... separately. My time served includes my combined imprisonment in three facilities. First, Greene County Jail in Springfield, Mo., where I spent a little over a year. Then, for a month, I was transferred to a prison for women in Vandalia, until I was relocated to the Chillicothe Correctional Center to serve the remainder of my sentence. Given all that time, and with the help of therapy, family, friends, books and my own writing, I have examined my life, actions and relationships in great breadth and depth. At last, I’ve been given access to information, documents, records, therapy sessions. I’m like a detective noticing patterns, theorizing, having lightbulb moments and making new connections between things that used to make no sense to me.

Related: Read PEOPLE's Cover Story on Gypsy Rose Blanchard's Prison Release After Murdering Mom: 'Ready for Freedom'

Still, while a year has passed since my release from prison, my scars, both emotional and physical, remain. The physical scars are like track marks that mock my progress. I’m not saying I can’t heal; what I am saying is that the physical representation of my trauma just adds another dimension to the healing process. Like when I’m enjoying one of life’s simplest joys (food, y’all), and I dive carefree into my first cut of steak or slurp of an oyster, but then have to pause and strategize the chew. Without salivary glands and teeth, thanks to unnecessary surgeries and medications, my past will always puncture my present.

The natural Louisiana sunlight that streams into my bedroom is far more forgiving than the harsh fluorescent lights at Chillicothe Correctional Center, where I was incarcerated for the seven years after my sentencing. I have a full-length mirror now, where I can see the whole of me. In prison, I could only see glimpses of my body in an eight-inch square mirror, never quite sure whether all my parts went together. In the warm light, my scars are less jarring than I found them to be in the past. Or maybe time is softening the marks on my body. But sometimes it’s what’s not visible that hurts us most. For me, that’s true. For all the trauma inflicted on my body since childhood, it’s the scar that isn’t there that always travels with me. The scar that otherwise would’ve been there — if I hadn’t asked Nick to kill my mother.

Related: Gypsy Rose Blanchard Opens Up on Struggle to Understand Mom's Munchausen by Proxy: 'Not Consciously Malicious' (Exclusive)

People really want to know: What was the final straw? When was the moment when I decided it was her or me? Here you go, y’all, on page three. One month before the murder, my mother tried to cut my throat. At least that’s how I saw it. The cause of concern, suddenly, was my voice. “It’s so high-pitched; it’s so squeaky,” my mother complained to my ear, nose and throat specialist. I thought my voice was distinct, like my uncommon name. Or maybe it was a family trait to be proud of. We both knew women on my mother’s side of the family with similar high-pitched voices. Besides, Nick said my childlike chirp was sexy, so I didn’t understand the issue, and I told my mother so. Never in front of the doctors, of course. I knew better than that.

But on the way home, I went on and on like, well ... a squeaky wheel. “There’s nothing wrong with my voice,” I said with a whimper, as she pushed me in my portable wheelchair to the parking lot where our car was parked, outside the hospital in downtown Kansas City. “You heard the doctor. That voice of yours might mean there’s a problem with your larynx, and that problem could be causing your sleep apnea,” she said, her word final. No matter my sassing, we were going to go ahead and meet with the pulmonologist the ENT had just recommended, though we both knew very well I didn’t have sleep apnea.

In fact, by this point, the entire ruse had been up between us for a while. I was 23 and had tried to run away twice. I’d shot her with a BB gun. She’d chained me to the bed. I was getting older and much harder to control. The older I got, the more physical and harsher her punishments became. She stopped letting me use my custom-made Jazzy HD power wheelchair because she couldn’t control it. I sensed she was becoming more erratic, more desperate.

Related: Gypsy Rose Blanchard Released from 10-Year Prison Sentence Early After Mother's Murder: 'I'm Ready' (Exclusive)

Only now do I see how her back was against a wall. The lie of the life she had created could have gotten her thrown in jail on a list of felony charges as long as the Bayou. Her watchful eye grew keener as the possibility of me standing up or speaking out became more plausible. We had achieved an unspoken standoff: I knew she was a lying, manipulative criminal. She knew nobody would believe me. Her carting me off in search of a new surgery, I believed, was her attempt to secure control.

When the pulmonologist spoke to my mother, it was as if I wasn’t in the room. “Why don’t we do an exploratory surgery of her larynx,” he suggested. “A simple operation of the voice box will get to the bottom of any respiratory or vocal abnormalities.” What I heard was, Let’s cut Gypsy’s throat for no reason at all. I’d had previous surgeries on my neck, and the scars brutalized me. But there was something about this particular surgery that felt more threatening than the others.

Even more so than all the other body parts that had been constantly searched, explored, against my will, without my consent. I turned to my mother: “That sounds like it hurts. I don’t want it. I don’t want to do it.” Tears didn’t form; rage did. My mother put her arm around my shoulder and pressed me close, a signal to quiet down that had been programmed long ago.

“It’s simple, Baby, it’s painless; it will help,” she said, side-eying the doctor. What I heard was: I don’t care what you want. The doctor assured me there was little risk. He kneeled down to my eye level and spoke slowly to me, like English wasn’t my native language. Who could blame him? He thought I had the mind of a seven-year-old. Except my trapped adult brain suddenly felt the urgency to avoid this surgery at all costs.

I’ve thought a lot about my heightened reaction in this very moment. You know, the neck is considered the most vulnerable part of the human body. Of course, I didn’t make this connection while sitting in the doctor’s office. But I do think we are wired to defend our most vulnerable parts. The muscles and blood vessels and nerves in the neck are easily strained and damaged. The scars on my neck from previous surgeries, especially the one on my salivary glands, were so pronounced because the skin on the neck is very thin.

Related: Munchausen by Proxy Victim Who Murdered Her Mom Describes Fear That Kept Her from Revealing Abuse

I hate to overdo the parallels (blame it on the therapy). But so many of the medical manipulations and interventions that I went through concerned the part of me that allows for expression and truth. She muzzled my mouth shut at nighttime, with a CPAP machine for my fake sleep apnea. It was so unpleasant to sleep that way; it felt like someone was taking a bicycle tire pump and forcing a ceaseless stream of air up my nose. She numbed my mouth with Orajel, so I’d drool and slur; she was responsible for my teeth falling out due to side effects of superfluous medications. By speaking for me and scripting my every interaction, she deprived me of finding my own voice. Now, the way I saw it, my literal voice, squeaky as it might be, could be taken from me. Her final play.

My mother and the pulmonologist scheduled the operation with the same casual enthusiasm of planning a teeth cleaning. Despite my recent awakening to the reality of my life, it was here where I truly feared the scope of her malice. This surgery was completely unnecessary. Exploratory, the doctor called it. While all the other surgeries also had been unnecessary, this was the first occasion where I was privy to my mother’s recklessness before the damage could be done.

Was this the plan for the rest of my life? To cut me up and open, piece by piece, just because she could? She was making me play Russian roulette with scalpels instead of bullets. If it wasn’t the voice box surgery, the odds seemed to be increasingly in favor of me dying on one of the operating tables. “Mama, what if they cut me wrong and then I lose my voice and I can’t talk?” I don’t think she would’ve minded that at all.

Excerpted with permission from Gypsy-Rose Blanchard’s My Time to Stand: A Memoir (BenBella Books; December 2024).

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,