Leanne Burke is the comeback kid

Leanne Burke found her faith beat fraud

From what used to be called a good God-fearing family, Leanne Burke was a model schoolgirl until the age of 13.

Then her private primary school closed and she was decanted into the state system - only to turn into a truant and and take up with dubious company.

By 18 she was married to a Jamaican drug dealer 13 years older than her who needed to wed to stay in the country.

Her downward spiral and her turnaround are chronicled in her book: The Fight of My Life.

To anyone she meets now, Leanne Burke is the owner of a successful events company, a published writer, a speaker and a key character in her church: All Nations for Christ.

Unless they'd read her book strangers would hardly suspect what a rollercoaster ride her life has been since she became a teenager.

Her rash marriage to a man who, she discovered, was knee-deep in gangs, guns and drug-dealing led her into a life of physical abuse and crime.

Add his involvement with witchcraft to the mix and it's an unsavoury brew.

Living a double life, she hadn't told either friends or family of her marriage, so felt she couldn't turn to them for help.

Instead she turned to the God she found she still believed in, and started going back to church.

The story's convoluted - with a prison sentence for fraud to be served before she could free herself of her past and begin to process it on the page.

Ask Leanne why a twenty-something should write an autobiography and she'll tell you it's a cautionary tale - but one which attests that no situation is hopeless. "If I can you can" could be its motto.

Called The Fight of My Life, the book's subtitle says it all: Purpose in the Pain. Its pages show she found it.