Gypsy Rose Blanchard Recalls Life With Mom Dee Dee in New Book (2025)

Gypsy Rose Blanchard’s feelings toward her late mother, Clauddine “Dee Dee” Blanchard, have changed over the years — and she explained how in her new memoir, My Time to Stand.

“Regardless of everything that my mother and I went through with each other — what I did to her and what she did to me — I’m now carrying her grandchild,” Gypsy, 33, wrote in the book, which hit shelves on Tuesday, December 10. “Later today, when I see my baby on the doctor’s monitor, I will wish that my mom was here for this.”

In June 2015, Gypsy and her then-boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, were arrested after Dee Dee was found dead in her home at age 48 with multiple stab wounds. Gypsy pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, while Godejohn, now 35, was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Since her December 2023 release on parole, Gypsy hasn’t shied away from opening up about what really led to Dee Dee’s murder, and her memoir is no exception.

“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,” Gypsy wrote. “I firmly believed that by doing so, I was saving the life she had guarded with all her might: mine.”

Keep scrolling for the biggest revelations about Dee Dee from My Time to Stand:

How Dee Dee Saw Her Daughter

According to Gypsy, she served as her mother’s “emotional support surrogate” even in her youngest days. “I’m all for the idea of ‘us against the world’ if you are a fierce single mom, raising strong daughters, modeling what can be accomplished when you stick together,” she wrote. “But our ‘us against the world’ looked more like her sticking to me. While I was very young, that stickiness was sweet like molasses.”

Gypsy went on to write that she and her mom bathed together, slept in the same bed and watched the same TV shows. “Her interests in sci-fi and fantasy and The People’s Court became my interests,” she recalled. “When I showed my own curiosity for things separate from her, like Barbie dolls, she’d be there to deflect: ‘Now, you don’t want those dolls when you have so many stuffed animals to play with.’”

The Alleged Abuse

The book goes into horrifying detail about the alleged physical and verbal abuse Gypsy suffered at the hands of Dee Dee. After Dee Dee caught her daughter talking to a man named Dan on the phone, she called her a “whore” and punched her legs “like she was a boxer and I was a piece of meat hanging in a freezer locker.”

Following another encounter with Dan, Dee Dee allegedly “handcuffed” Gypsy to a dog leash and connected it to her body. “If she fell asleep, I couldn’t move without waking her up,” Gypsy recalled, noting that the leashing went on for two weeks. “I was at her mercy for everything — to go to the bathroom, for food, for everything. As punishment, she would not feed me every day, just a little bit of broth every other day. I would frequently get hunger pains. She was right beside me and would eat whatever she wanted. She kept a knife by her bedside table, which she said was for protection if I attempted to run away or do anything to leave.”

The BB Gun Incident

At one point, Gypsy shot her mother with a BB gun, firing 10 rounds at her after asking again to leave their home. “I saw her flesh wounds, and I felt sorry and apologetic that it had escalated to this,” she recalled. “She didn’t hit me or tie me up again. I think she was afraid of me. … I was scared s—less of her, and she was scared s—less of me.”

The Movie Theater Aftermath

After Gypsy attempted to meet up with Godejohn at a movie theater, Dee Dee allegedly locked her in an outdoor shed overnight. “When I woke up, I was disoriented,” she wrote. “I looked around the shed and could see some sunlight peeking in. My fingers and toes were numb, and I must have slept hard because I had drool on my cheek. She had left me there all night, overnight, alone and scared.”

The 1 Real Ailment

While Gypsy says that her mother fabricated most of the claims about her health, there was one that was real, and Gypsy initially thought her mother used this one abnormality as a “smoking gun” to justify other unnecessary medical treatments.

“I actually do have what’s known as a microdeletion, 1q21.1, which is a chromosomal change in which a small piece of chromosome 1 is deleted in each cell,” she explained. “This microdeletion is known to ‘increase the risk of delayed development, intellectual disability, physical abnormalities, and neurological and psychiatric problems.’ Wow. What a coincidence. Every illness my mother claimed I had had fallen beneath all of these umbrellas. Except I didn’t actually have a single one of them.”

Eventually, however, Gypsy realized that the microdeletion test didn’t occur until two decades after she’d already lived with a bevy of fake illnesses. “Either my mother knew I had this condition before the 2012 test, researched the potential outcomes, and ran with them … or, this one time, the disorder she claimed for me turned out to be real (though without real symptoms),” she wrote. “This was a rabbit hole my brain went down and I still can’t climb out of. Different scenarios keep me up at night.”

How She Thinks Dee Dee Would Feel Now

In the book’s epilogue, Gypsy theorized that her mother would forgive her for her actions — in part because the ninth anniversary of her death coincided with the day Gypsy got the first sonogram of the baby she’s expecting with boyfriend Ken Urker.

“I like to think that my mother is telling me that she wants me to move on with my life, that she forgives me,” Gypsy shared. “And what I will do on this anniversary is her way of helping me change the way I think of myself every June 10. Maybe now, with my freedom, we can both be released from our purgatories. Maybe now she can be free too. She always said we were two sides of the same penny.”