Hannah Brown Opens Up About the Tragic Murder of Her Aunt and Cousins: 'It Changed Everything'

Hannah Brown's new memoir is touching on some of the most painful moments in her life.

In one excerpt she shared with E! News, the Bachelorette alum recalled learning about the murder of her two young cousins and her aunt when she was just 6 years old. The book, God Bless This Mess: Learning to Live and Love Through Life's Best (and Worst) Moments, was released Tuesday.

According to the outlet, Brown, 27, wrote that she first knew something had happened when her dad had to miss her dance recital to go "help" her Aunt LeeLee, whom she later learned had died alongside her children Robin, 6, and Trent, 4.

"Robin and Trent were almost the exact same ages as me and my brother Patrick— six and four—and we were just about as close as cousins could be," Brown wrote. "They were not only our family but two of our very best friends, all wrapped into one."

"It would take a few days for me to understand that Aunt LeeLee and Robin and Trent had been murdered," she later added. "It would take months after that to put the pieces together, since nobody wanted to talk about it. And it would take years for me to get the whole story, once I was old enough to look it all up for myself on the Internet."

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Brown explained that the murder "changed everything" for her, noting that she wonders if her current narcolepsy diagnosis could be linked to the past trauma.

"When my mom told us that somebody had come into their house and 'hurt them,' it terrified me in the deepest parts of my heart," she wrote. "Like I said, I didn't know the whole story with all the details until years later, but coming that close to something so awful, so terrifying— it was a turning point for me. It changed everything. I was no longer living in the innocence of an untouched childhood."

"I sometimes still question if I'm in a really bad dream," she continued. "You see someone is old and has lived a long life, but when they're younger than my dad. When they're a family member. When they're cousins. When they're Robin and Trent. When Robin was the exact same age as me."

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Though she said her family "didn't believe" in therapy at the time, Brown shared that did eventually seek out professional help.

"I wouldn't begin to heal until I was in my mid-twenties, in the presence of a therapist. And until I opened up about it in this book, almost no one knew about it. So now, I'm just hoping that you, and anybody else who hears about it, will take this story and treat me gently with it," she wrote.