Growing up in the roughest neighborhoods throughout the East Bay and Northern California, Melissa McCarty watched as so many she knew succumbed to drugs, gangs and violence. To survive, she and her brother learned to be tough and streetwise-but deep inside Melissa had much greater dreams. With unrelenting ambition she worked her way out of town, graduated from college and became a television newscaster. After climbing the ladder from city to city and market to market, she finally attained her ultimate dream: being a top newscaster on a major television station in Los Angeles.But this achievement didn't come without a price. At all hours of the day and night Melissa covered the worst of the news: tragic accidents, HORRIFIC crimes, devastating fires. She exposed criminals, put herself in danger, and always sought the truth...about everything except her own past. It haunted her in the form of her brother Mikey, the hero of her youth, whose undiagnosed mental illness drove him ever deeper into a mire of poverty, addiction, arrest, bad relationships, and violence from which Melissa could not help him escape. So even as she calmly reported on someone else's cruel fate on TV, in her personal life Melissa struggled with accepting and supporting similar needs in her own family. She reported the headlines as her brother was making headlines; the criminals she chased in her work role we similar to those who helped raise her growing up. Her on-air smile and practiced public emotion became her defensive armor in private as well; she was unable, or perhaps unwilling, to exude personal warmth and let her guard down. The armor was so much a part of her she didn't notice it had stopped protecting her and turned into a weapon that damaged her relationships with everyone from bosses to boyfriends. It might have even cost her the career she had worked so hard to build. After dedicating her career to changing the world, Melissa realized she had to change herself. In News Girls Don't Cry, Melissa McCarty confronts the memory-demons of her past, exploring how they hardened her and kept her from becoming a more loving, empathic, and fully-functioning person in love and life-and how she turned it all around. An inspiring story of overcoming adversity, grabbing second chances and becoming happy and authentic.