Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. "My soul looks back," James Baldwin said, "and wonders how I got over." Volume two of Sharon Doubiago's memoir, MY FATHER'S LOVE, reveals the legacy of her father's sexual and psychological abuse that continued throughout his life and the toxic effects it has had on the lives of everyone in the family. How family secrets ripple through succeeding generations with devastating results, how family myths become more powerful than truth, how they are maintained at any cost, and how denial blinds us to what we do not want to, or cannot bear to see. Most of us never realize we are in denial but Doubiago is not most of us, for she is a poet of exceptional power and insight. This is a book about all of us, how we deceive ourselves and others, believe what we want to believe, what we are conditioned to believe, how we are, as R. D. Laing put it, "destroying ourselves with violence masquerading as love." America collectively is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. MY FATHER'S LOVE helps us "to get over."
Author City: SAN FRANCISCO, CA USA
Sharon Doubiago's memoir, MY FATHER'S LOVE, VOLUME I: PORTRAIT OF THE POET AS A YOUNG GIRL (Wild Ocean Press, 2009), was a finalist in the Northern California Book Awards in Creative Nonfiction, 2010. Love on the Streets: Selected and New Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008) received the Glenna Luschei Distinguished Poet Award and was a finalist in the Paterson New Jersey Poetry Prize. She has written two dozen books of poetry and prose, most notably the epic poem HARD COUNTRY (West End Press, 1999), the book-length poem South America Mi Hija (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992), which was nominated twice for the National Book Award, and the story collections EL NIÑO (Lost Roads Press, 1989) and The Book of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (Graywolf Press, 1988), which was selected to the Oregon Culture Heritage list: Literary Oregon, 100 Books, 1800-2000. She holds three Pushcart Prizes for poetry and fiction and the Oregon Book Award for Poetry for Psyche Drives the Coast and a California Arts Council Award. She's an online mentor in Creative Writing for the University of Minnesota (Split Rock) and a board member of PEN/Oakland. For two decades she has been writing Son, a memoir about the mother-son relationship, for which she has received two Oregon Institute of Literary Art Fellowships. Her new collection of memoir stories, Why She Loved Him, is circulating. She has published over a hundred essay—from the personal and creative, to the scholarly.
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