Parenthood is very much on Gypsy-Rose Blanchard’s mind during a recent Zoom interview about her upcoming memoir. It’s been almost a year since she was released from prison after serving eight years for her role in then-boyfriend Nicolas Godejohn’s 2015 murder of her mother and she is now expecting her first child with Ken Urker. The pair just spent Thanksgiving with his family in Florida, where it was still warm enough to swim in the ocean.
“Being a part of that family time is the most important thing to me, because for the longest time I couldn’t,” says Blanchard.
The younger Blanchard says her hunger for family bonding pre-dates her incarceration. In “My Time to Stand,” the memoir of which she is co-author with Melissa Moore, she alleges that Dee Dee Blanchard, who suffered from what is commonly known as Munchhausen syndrome by proxy, isolated her from the rest of their family in order to conceal the fabricated medical conditions and treatments she forced her child to undergo. This included the removal of her teeth and salivary glands, the use of a wheelchair and the insertion of a feeding tube, according to Blanchard.
“That feeding tube kept me connected to my mother the way an umbilical cord does,” she writes in the book begun during her imprisonment.
Blanchard initially met Moore, whose father is known as the Happy Face Killer, when she executive produced the Lifetime docuseries called “The Prison Confessions of Gypsy Rose Blanchard.” But the two connected over the fact that Patricia Arquette played Dee Dee in “The Act,” a 2019 Hulu series dramatizing Blanchard’s life, while younger brother David Arquette portrayed Moore’s father in 2014’s “Happy Face Killer,” also on Lifetime.
“There was a friendship that was formed there, and that doesn’t happen with me and journalists,” Blanchard says.
The bulk of “My Time to Stand” was written using recordings and transcripts of Blanchard’s calls with Moore while Blanchard was incarcerated. Once Blanchard was released, that’s when the editing, proofreading and fact-checking began.
“It was a good six months of in-person work, and a good three years behind bars,” Blanchard says.
During the whirlwind past year, in between learning to drive and navigate daily mundanities such as paying bills, Blanchard began divorce proceedings with her husband, Ryan Anderson, whom she married in 2022, got back together with her ex-fiance, Urker, and became pregnant with their daughter, due in January.
“I would have done things differently. I would have done things a little more cleanly,” she says now. “But it happened, and here we are. It’s all about learning from your mistakes.”
In her book, Blanchard alleges she was molested by her maternal grandfather, Claude Pitre, and that her mother was as well, but he has denied the claims. Blanchard’s not worried about becoming like her mother, however.
“I’m starting to notice things about myself that are different from my mother even in my pregnancy,” she says. “My mother didn’t like being pregnant.”
Her mother didn’t like the feeling of the baby moving inside her, and didn’t have a baby shower, according to Blanchard. “So even those little things that I’m doing in my pregnancy, I’m doing different from her,” she says, stressing that she is not going to inflict the same procedures her mom did on her.
“I also have something that my mother didn’t have, which is a really good support system. They’re there to support me and guide me,” she says.
Blanchard also wants to give back to the charities that her mother allegedly duped into providing subsidized medical care and housing, namely Make-A-Wish and Habitat for Humanity, the former of which she made a sizable donation to while the latter declined her offer to volunteer. “I can understand,” she concedes. “That’s totally OK.
“I’m trying to make choices and find those avenues, but it’s quite difficult when you’re coming out and just trying to adjust to everything yourself,” she says. “Those are all things that I’m currently working on. It’s a path.”
