Born to a single mother raising four children on welfare and food stamps, James Rogan seemed destined for failure. Instead, he became a gang murder prosecutor, California judge, majority leader of the California State Assembly, United States congressman, and one of the House managers selected to prosecute President Bill Clinton during his 1999 impeachment trial.

Abandoned before birth by his bartender father and raised by a mother who later became a convicted felon, Rogan grew up in San Francisco's tough Mission District. Fascinated by politics and history from an early age, he even persuaded former President Harry S Truman to help him with a school assignment. But he also ran with a rough crowd and, after years of increasingly reckless behavior, was expelled from high school.

His path to public service was anything but conventional. He worked as a porn theater bouncer, tended bar at a Sunset Strip mud wrestling club and a Hell's Angels hangout, and struggled simply to stay afloat. Then, in 1978, a chance meeting with a young Arkansas attorney changed his life. The lawyer encouraged Rogan to pursue higher education, study law, and dedicate himself to public service. Twenty years later, that same lawyer—President Bill Clinton—would become the defendant in the impeachment trial Rogan helped prosecute.

After fighting his way through college and law school, Rogan joined the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office, where he prosecuted gang murder cases before embarking on a distinguished career in law, politics, and public service.

Narrated by the author, Rough Edges is unlike any other Washington memoir. By turns hilarious, heartbreaking, inspiring, and deeply personal, it is the remarkable true story of one man's unlikely journey from poverty and welfare to the halls of Congress—and to the center of one of the most dramatic political events in modern American history.