Caught off-guard, Warren admits that she “fumbled” when reporters first asked her about the controversy.

Things only got worse when the Brown campaign asked whether her parents had lied to their children about her family. “He attacked my dead parents,” Warren writes. “I was hurt, and I was angry.”

Brown’s allegation that Warren had used her background to get ahead “simply wasn’t true,” she writes. “I was stunned by the attacks.”

Warren devotes a section of her book — called “Native American” — to this controversy, explaining that she had simply grown up learning about her Native American background from her family and that as a kid, she had never questioned her family’s stories or asked for documentation.