Silken Laumann is preparing psychologically for a book tour, the way she might have prepared for an Olympic match in the past.

That’s because the revelations in her 290-page memoir out Tuesday, are sure to create waves.

In Unsinkable the three-time Olympic rowing medallist, idolized for her bronze winning comeback at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics from an accident that ripped the muscle off her shin bone and shattered her ankle only 10 weeks before the games, reveals a childhood of terror, self-hatred, anorexia and cutting; a dramatic counterpoint to her teen years dedicated to running then rowing.

Laumann, 49, makes it clear in the interview that she didn’t start preparing for this book launch in the last few weeks or months. She’s been preparing over her adult life through therapy sessions and the same hard work she has always done whether for an athletic competition or her public speaking career.

“I think I had to reach the place in my life where I’ve done a lot of healing, where I’m very grounded,” she said. “I’ve done the personal work. The last few days before going public I’ve made sure I’m looking after myself and feel strong in my message.”

In Unsinkable Laumann describes growing up, alongside a younger brother Joerg and older sister Daniele, with a talented but tempestuous and troubled mother, Seigrid Seideman Laumann, who was at once charming, inventive, artistic — and seemingly, to her small children, murderously threatening.

How threatening? Laumann’s brother Joerg started sleeping with a knife under his pillow when he was eight because he was afraid of his mother. Laumann, meanwhile, always slept with her window open well into adulthood — to the point she wouldn’t even stay in a hotel if it didn’t have windows that opened, she says — after her mother threatened to gas the entire family. And Laumann, Joerge and Daniele packed a little kit together so they’d be ready “if we needed to make a run for it.”

The feelings of unworthiness from her mother’s devastating criticisms — “She could cut a person to shreds while wearing a lovely smile” — combined with the uncertainty of when her mother would turn on her — she once broke a stack of plates over Laumann’s head — led the blonde, ambitious athlete to try to control other aspects of her life: as a teen she was diagnosed as anorexic and she played with cutting her wrists with a razor.

“I’d fantasized about slitting a vein just to end my anguish and confusion and self-hate,” she writes. But instead she cut just deeply enough to release stress: “I cut lightly but deliberately and repeatedly to release some of my anguish so I could survive. It felt good to bleed, providing temporary relief. It also terrified me that I could do this to myself, and that someday I might possibly be tempted to go further.”

In the end it wasn’t Laumann’s razor that would cut to the bone, but her mother’s words. “I could kill you and then kill myself.” Understatedly, Laumann says: “The book presents a big shift in what people know about me.” But she points out: “I’m the same person I was a week ago or two weeks ago ... I’m still the strong person who lives big and lives with optimism.” Ironically, Laumann, who ran the book by all her close family members — her parents separated and both are remarried now — before publishing, says she has “had some good conversations with (her mother) about the book. “She’s at a place where she’s found peace,” — far away from her children in Florida. “I told her ‘I want you to read the book, but you don’t need to read the media.’ ”

And Laumann doesn’t paint a one-sided picture. “Both my parents were strong role models,” she says. “Dark and light live together . . a lot of things were right.”

Still, does she think her father, Hans, could have done more to protect his children from his wife’s tyranny?

“I think I went through a period of time in therapy where I thought my dad could have done better,” she says. “But we all do our best at the time we’re doing it ... “It was a different time. If he’d sought help (to protect us) from my mum, my mum might have been taken away from us,” she says. “I’ve moved through healing, let go of any anger,” she emphasizes in a clear, confident voice.

As bad as it was, Laumann surprisingly says she wouldn’t change a thing: “I’m deeply grateful for everything in my life. I wouldn’t want it to happen to the child next door, but it helped me achieve what I want to achieve. It doesn’t mean it was easy or at times it didn’t almost defeat me, but it has given me a deeper connection with people.”

Still, for Laumann this was a book that had to be written to complete her healing. In the introduction to her book she said the story “raged” inside her, and that she felt that to be authentic as an inspirational speaker she had to be honest. “How could I help others find their inner courage while holding back the real story of the self-doubt that continued to plague me?” she writes.

It took five years to write the book, she says. What started out as journaling therapy became something she needed to share. “I didn’t feel like anything else in my life could happen until I wrote this book.” One of her biggest motivators when she had doubts was that her own story might help others, she says. “Whatever I’m going through, chances are a whole lot of other people are going through what I am. When you find the courage to really be yourself just by ... daring to be that honest,” people can say: “She’s gone through it, too, and look at all the things she’s accomplished.”

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As for anorexia and cutting, Laumann remembers back to being a teenager and how everything was so intense and thinks about her own four children (two with her first husband, rower John Wallace, and two who are the children of her partner GoodLife Fitness owner David Patchell-Evans): “If a teenager reads my book and takes something from my message, takes a piece of encouragement, I will be so grateful.”

But in the end, Laumann isn’t worried about how her book will be received. “I can’t spend too much time getting into other people’s heads. I have no control of that.” Instead she focuses, like the trained athlete she is, on her goal: “I wrote it telling the truth and telling what I needed to tell. People are going to receive it from a place in life they’re at and I just have to trust that.”