A Chance After All

ONE NIGHT, STEVE Pemberton was reading the book The Lion and the Mouse to his 6-year-old son when his little boy looked up at him, puzzled. “When you were small, did you have a daddy?” he asked Pemberton. Surprised, Pemberton realized he had to answer honestly. “No, I didn’t.”

Pemberton was abandoned as a toddler by his mother, who was a struggling alcoholic. Before she died, all five of her children were taken in by the broken foster care system in New Bedford, Mass., each to a different family. “It’s hard to describe what it was like waking up in fear of my life as a child,” says Pemberton, who didn’t know who his father was until he was much older. “My secret weapon was that I loved to read. It gave me a vision that I was different from all of the labels that had been put on me.”

Pemberton defied all expectations, outlasted the abuse from a horrific foster family and earned a full scholarship to Boston College. The question Pemberton fielded from his young son prompted him to write his memoir, A Chance in the World ($17, Thomas Nelson). Almost immediately, filmmakers approached the busy Walgreens executive about turning it into a movie. This fall, A Chance in the World debuts on the film festival circuit. “When I was researching my book, I was given access to my [foster care] case file,” Pemberton says. “Early on, someone predicted, ‘This little boy doesn’t have a chance in this world.’ They painted me as this broken child. I had the choice to lament and languish or rebuild and believe. I knew I had to build something different, something better.”