Inside the episode
The morning everything changed
Jody grew up in Atlanta in the late 1960s in what he calls the perfect world. Five brothers, a new house, family holidays and parents with steady jobs. Then two of his older brothers got into heroin, and his parents started to drift apart.
One night, while his parents were away, his brother threw a party to sell drugs. A man called Mr Doster looked after the younger boys, making them floats and playing cards. The next morning Jody found him dead in a car outside. Jody was eight. Rumours, threats and a house fire followed, and the family life he knew was gone.
It was also the moment Jody made his first big decision. He would never put a needle in his arm. He knew that was not a world he wanted to be in.
The hippies who fed two hungry boys
Soon there was no food and no one looking after Jody and his brother Mitch. One day a young neighbour called Judy Hansen saw them trying to cook something on the stove. She took the pan out of Jody's hand, turned off the stove and took them to McDonald's.
Then her friends joined in. A group of hippies, mostly around 19 or 20, started bringing food, taking the boys out on birthdays and to amusement parks, and reading them stories about how beautiful the world could be. A couple called Steve and Carol even played The Needle and the Damage Done at his school - the song that later gave his book its name.
"These people didn't have to help me," Jody says. They gave the boys something they were losing: hope, and the feeling that there was a future.
Fighting the system at 15
At 15, Jody went along with his older brother to rob some people of their weed. It ended in a car crash and an arrest, and Jody became the first juvenile in Georgia to be tried as an adult. A month after sentencing, the judge quietly changed his sentence so he would end up in prison.
Nobody believed him, so at 15 he wrote to the Legal Aid and Defender Society himself. A lawyer called James C. Bonner Jr took his case by letter, and the staff at the youth centre refused to hand Jody over while it was fought. Bonner won. Jody was released and, within eight months, free.
Once again, the people who stood in his corner were not his family. They were strangers who saw something in him.
Choosing a different path
Life did not get easy straight away. Eleven months after his release, Jody came home to find his father had died, and he ended up on the street. With no other options, he started selling drugs, just like his brothers.
Then he watched what his drugs were doing to one girl's life and said, "I quit everything." He moved to Florida, learned to fly planes, came back to Atlanta, met his wife and started a family. He kept all his court papers from childhood, because he always knew he would write a book one day.
Turning a dark story into light
Jody put an ad in the paper, and actress Polly Craig answered it. Together they wrote The Damage Done. Polly became one of the biggest influences on his life, still acting in her 90s. He went on to co-create the Murder Link podcast with his daughter Katie, and to tell stories on stage with The Moth.
What he has learned is simple. People like the dark, but they love the light. They want to see what you did with the hard parts. Now Jody wants to take his story to the screen, so others can look at it and think, "That was me, and that's what I can be."
