“My children doesn’t do happy endings. We perform unhappy endings or irritating endings or no endings in any way. We are hardwired to anticipate another interruption or disappearance or damaged promise.”

Hope Solo is the face of the modern female athlete. She is fearless, outspoken, and the very best in the world at what she will: protecting the goal of the U.S. women’s team. Her outsized skill offers led her to the pinnacle of her sport-the Olympics as well as the Globe Cup-and produced her into an international celebrity about Single: A Memoir of Hope who is just as likely to appear on ABC’s Dancing with the Celebrities as she actually is for the addresses of Sports activities Illustrated, ESPN The Publication, and Vogue. But her journey-which started in Richland, Washington, where she was raised by her strong-willed mother around the scorched earth of defunct nuclear tests sites-is likewise haunted from the fallout of her family history. Her dad, a philanderer and con guy, was convicted of embezzlement when Solo was an infant. She lost contact with him as he drifted out of jail and into homelessness. By the time they reunited, years afterwards, in the parking lot of a supermarket, she was an All-American goalkeeper in the College or university of Washington and currently a budding prospect for the U.S. nationwide group. He was living in the woods.

Despite harboring serious doubts also about the provenance of her father’s last name (and her very own), Single embraces him as fiercely as she pursues her dreams to be a world-class soccer player. When those dreams are threatened by her standing within the national team, as when she was famously benched in the semifinals of the 2007 World Cup after four shutouts and spoke her piece publicly, we see a girl of uncompromising independence and hard-won perseverance navigate the petty backlash against her. For the very first time, she tells her version of that controversial episode, and offers with it a full knowledge of her hard-scrabble life.

Moving, sometimes shocking, Single is a portrait of an athlete finding redemption. This is actually the Hope Solo whom few possess ever glimpsed.