Kimball Graduate Authors "Healing" Book

Former Kimballite, Rochael Soper recently published “Out of Hell and Into Healing”, a book written from personal experience of the struggles that often accompany growing up with an alcoholic parent--and painfully witnessing the abuse of others in the family.

She began writing the book in 2003 as a way of trying to heal from her past. “Is there anything more frightening to a child, than seeing a parent suffer humiliation and violence at the hands of another parent?” she asks in one passage. “There is a hole in my heart where my father should have been, the pain of which has fueled my perfectionism, and over-compensation.”

Soper, the daughter of lifetime Kimball resident, Mary Lou Pedrett-Soper and the late Ronald Richard Soper, graduated from Kimball High School in 1989 at the top of her class. After high school she went on to study at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she attended for one year. She then studied at Texas Christian Unverisity for three and a half years. She earned a Master’s degree from Duke Law School.

After receiving her Master’s , Soper lived in New York and worked an an attorney for the law firm Fulbright and Jaworski, from 1998-2000. In 2000, she moved to Palo Alto, California, where she worked for the firm Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati to practice with their technology transactions group from June of 2000 through January of 2002. Soper then took a year off from work and studies to write, direct and produce a documentary film on the drug “Ecstasy” through her own production company called Blueize Entertainment. It was a film she got involved in to make people aware of what the drug was all about through the experiences of those who used or experimented with the drug.

Currently, Soper has her own law practice where she works from her home in San Francisco, California. She also serves as an adjunct professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law. She gives presentations to attorneys and artists regarding intellectual property rights and has also provided corporate negotiation training for clients.

In her spare time, Soper has been working on her next book which stems from stories that she was told by her mother, Mary and Mary’s brother, Robert Pedrett, of their memories of living in Kimball during World War II while their father was away.

Soper explains that she has gathered some of stories for the book, but that the book will be written as fictional.