Losing and Finding My Father
Losing and Finding My Father

Author: Kira Freed

Publisher:

Published: 2015-08-24

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 9780692317099

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Losing and Finding My Father is an adult daughter's journey of discovery sparked by the illness, coma, and subsequent death of her father. Having struggled for years to come to terms with a childhood marked by his invalidation and abuse, she attends to her ailing father, converses with him even during his coma, and uncovers the love hidden deep within their painful relationship. It is a story of loss -- loss of childhood trust, loss of self-esteem and desire for intimacy, loss of the father. Ultimately, it is a story of revelation -- about finding one's voice, softening emotional armor, forgiving the past, creating pathways to intimacy, and revising one's life story. Losing and Finding My Father offers a promise of growth and healing to children (and parents) of all ages and weaves together the following themes: * Challenging cultural attitudes about grief * Exploring "right relationship" with having been abused as a child * Authentic forgiveness * The power of emotions to heal * Conscious caretaking * Developing the capacity to have a healthy intimate relationship The book also offers a substantial appendix of self-help tools and exercises. From the foreword by Richard Schwartz, PhD, developer of the Internal Family Systems model of psychotherapy: "When her father was dying, Kira Freed had the courage to take the healing path. Her carefully and beautifully documented journey provides a model for anyone who might consider this difficult route." "If you've experienced the loss of a loved one who was a source of pain and challenges throughout your life, reach for Kira Freed's book Losing and Finding My Father. Her poignant stories, processing tools, and personal healing will give you hope, guidance, and a way forward -- through and beyond your own grief." -- Carol McClelland, PhD, author of The Seasons of Change: Using Nature's Wisdom to Grow Through Life's Inevitable Ups and Downs "Losing and Finding My Father is Kira Freed's personal story, and this story is a teaching tale. In it, Kira shares her journey of resolving the effects of living with an abusive father whom she also loved deeply. Throughout, we are invited to share in the complex legacy of trauma intertwined with the healing opportunities that Kira courageously engaged. She also includes an appendix filled with a variety of approaches she used to support her healing -- powerful resources and practices for anyone taking this journey." -- Nancy J. Napier, LMFT, author of Getting Through the Day: Strategies for Adults Hurt as Children "Kira has written a poignant and intimate account of her father's dying and of her grief. In clear language she shares with us the struggles, pain, healings and even transformation that so many of us have experienced with the death of a parent. Reading her book will both comfort and inspire you." -- Alexandra Kennedy, psychotherapist and author of Losing a Parent and The Infinite Thread

Finding My Father
Finding My Father

Author: Deborah Tannen

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 110188584X

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A #1 New York Times bestselling author traces her father’s life from turn-of-the-century Warsaw to New York City in an intimate memoir about family, memory, and the stories we tell. “An accomplished, clear-eyed, and affecting memoir about a man who is at once ordinary and extraordinary.”—Forward Long before she was the acclaimed author of a groundbreaking book about women and men, praised by Oliver Sacks for having “a novelist’s ear for the way people speak,” Deborah Tannen was a girl who adored her father. Though he was often absent during her childhood, she was profoundly influenced by his gift for writing and storytelling. As she grew up and he grew older, she spent countless hours recording conversations with her father for the account of his life she had promised him she’d write. But when he hands Tannen journals he kept in his youth, and she discovers letters he saved from a woman he might have married instead of her mother, she is forced to rethink her assumptions about her father’s life and her parents’ marriage. In this memoir, Tannen embarks on the poignant, yet perilous, quest to piece together the puzzle of her father’s life. Beginning with his astonishingly vivid memories of the Hasidic community in Warsaw, where he was born in 1908, she traces his journey: from arriving in New York City in 1920 to quitting high school at fourteen to support his mother and sister, through a vast array of jobs, including prison guard and gun-toting alcohol tax inspector, to eventually establishing the largest workers’ compensation law practice in New York and running for Congress. As Tannen comes to better understand her father’s—and her own—relationship to Judaism, she uncovers aspects of his life she would never have imagined. Finding My Father is a memoir of Eli Tannen’s life and the ways in which it reflects the near century that he lived. Even more than that, it’s an unflinching account of a daughter’s struggle to see her father clearly, to know him more deeply, and to find a more truthful story about her family and herself.

The Story of My Father
The Story of My Father

Author: Sue Miller

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 0307432661

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In the fall of 1988, Sue Miller found herself caring for her father as he slipped into the grasp of Alzheimer's disease. She was, she claims, perhaps the least constitutionally suited of all her siblings to be in the role in which she suddenly found herself, and in The Story of My Father she grapples with the haunting memories of those final months and the larger narrative of her father's life. With compassion, self-scrutiny, and an urgency born of her own yearning to rescue her father's memory from the disorder and oblivion that marked his dying and death, Sue Miller takes us on an intensely personal journey that becomes, by virtue of her enormous gifts of observation, perception, and literary precision, a universal story of fathers and daughters. James Nichols was a fourth-generation minister, a retired professor from Princeton Theological Seminary. Sue Miller brings her father brilliantly to life in these pages-his religious faith, his endless patience with his children, his gaiety and willingness to delight in the ridiculous, his singular gifts as a listener, and the rituals of church life that stayed with him through his final days. She recalls the bitter irony of watching him, a church historian, wrestle with a disease that inexorably lays waste to notions of time, history, and meaning. She recounts her struggle with doctors, her deep ambivalence about many of her own choices, and the difficulty of finding, continually, the humane and moral response to a disease whose special cruelty it is to dissolve particularities and to diminish, in so many ways, the humanity of those it strikes. She reflects, unforgettably, on the variable nature of memory, the paradox of trying to weave a truthful narrative from the threads of a dissolving life. And she offers stunning insight into her own life as both a daughter and a writer, two roles that swell together here in a poignant meditation on the consolations of storytelling. With the care, restraint, and consummate skill that define her beloved and best-selling fiction, Sue Miller now gives us a rigorous, compassionate inventory of two lives, in a memoir destined to offer comfort to all sons and daughters struggling-as we all eventually must-to make peace with their fathers and with themselves.

Finding My Father
Finding My Father

Author: Marian Poeppelmeyer

Publisher: Author Academy Elite

Published: 2019-06-28

Total Pages: 342

ISBN-13: 9781640856295

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On Nov. 1, 1955, the bombing of US Air Lines Flight 629 outside Denver, Colorado, left 44 people instantly killed and a nation stunned. How does one family pick up their shattered lives and move on? Finding My Father delves into the ripple effect of tragedy and trauma in this family's life who lost a husband and father in this historical event.

Lost Fathers
Lost Fathers

Author: Laraine Herring

Publisher: Hazelden Publishing

Published: 2005-03-03

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 9781592851553

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Examines the long-term ramifications for adult women who, as adolescent girls, lost their fathers to death, divorce, or addiction; helps them understand how their behaviors were shaped by that loss at a pivotal developmental stage; and provides some interactive exercises to help them heal. Original.

Losing Your Parents, Finding Yourself
Losing Your Parents, Finding Yourself

Author: Victoria Secunda

Publisher: Hyperion

Published: 2001-04-25

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780786886517

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An eloquent book that explores the impact on one's life of losing a parent as an adult, and the effect it has on families, careers, and friendships -- now in paperback. Losing a parent is an event that happens, sooner or later, to nearly everyone. Yet seldom has the impact of parental death on the identities of adult offspring been examined. This book fills that gap. Backed by her original study and filled with compelling case histories, Secunda's book explores what happens to men and women when they are on their own in ways they have never been before. She addresses myriad issues, including: What does it mean to be living without parents to please or rebel against? How does adult "orphanhood" alter relationships with one's siblings, partner, friends, children, or one's career choices? How does it reshape one's sense of self? Losing Your Parents, Finding Your Self offers the assurance that out of loss can come unforeseen gain -- that on the other side of sorrow, we can discover new hope, wisdom, and strength.

Reading My Father
Reading My Father

Author: Alexandra Styron

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2011-04-19

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1416595066

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PART MEMOIR AND PART ELEGY, READING MY FATHER IS THE STORY OF A DAUGHTER COMING TO KNOW HER FATHER AT LAST— A GIANT AMONG TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN NOVELISTS AND A MAN WHOSE DEVASTATING DEPRESSION DARKENED THE FAMILY LANDSCAPE. In Reading My Father, William Styron’s youngest child explores the life of a fascinating and difficult man whose own memoir, Darkness Visible, so searingly chronicled his battle with major depression. Alexandra Styron’s parents—the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Sophie’s Choice and his political activist wife, Rose—were, for half a century, leading players on the world’s cultural stage. Alexandra was raised under both the halo of her father’s brilliance and the long shadow of his troubled mind. A drinker, a carouser, and above all “a high priest at the altar of fiction,” Styron helped define the concept of The Big Male Writer that gave so much of twentieth-century American fiction a muscular, glamorous aura. In constant pursuit of The Great Novel, he and his work were the dominant force in his family’s life, his turbulent moods the weather in their ecosystem. From Styron’s Tidewater, Virginia, youth and precocious literary debut to the triumphs of his best-known books and on through his spiral into depression, Reading My Father portrays the epic sweep of an American artist’s life, offering a ringside seat on a great literary generation’s friendships and their dramas. It is also a tale of filial love, beautifully written, with humor, compassion, and grace.

Nobody's Son: A Memoir
Nobody's Son: A Memoir

Author: Mark Slouka

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2016-10-18

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0393292312

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"I have never before read anything except Nabokov’s Speak, Memory that so relentlessly and shrewdly exhausted the kindness and cruelty of recollection’s shaping devices." —Geoffrey Wolff Born in Czechoslovakia, Mark Slouka’s parents survived the Nazis only to have to escape the Communist purges after the war. Smuggled out of their own country, the newlyweds joined a tide of refugees moving from Innsbruck to Sydney to New York, dragging with them a history of blood and betrayal that their son would be born into. From World War I to the present, Slouka pieces together a remarkable story of refugees and war, displacement and denial—admitting into evidence memories, dreams, stories, the lies we inherit, and the lies we tell—in an attempt to reach his mother, the enigmatic figure at the center of the labyrinth. Her story, the revelation of her life-long burden and the forty-year love affair that might have saved her, shows the way out of the maze.

Forget Prayers, Bring Cake
Forget Prayers, Bring Cake

Author: Merissa Nathan Gerson

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2023-01-03

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13:

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Though at times it may seem impossible, we can heal with help from our friends and community– if we know how to ask. This heartrending, relatable account of one woman’s reckoning with loss is a guide to the world of self-recovery, self-love, and the skills necessary to meeting one's own needs in these times of pain– especially when that pain is suffered alone. Grief is all around us. In the world of today it has become common and layered, no longer only an occasional weight. A book needed now more than ever, Forget Prayers, Bring Cake is for people of all ages and orientations dealing with grief of any sort—professional, personal, romantic, familial, or even the sadness of the modern day. This book provides actions to boost self-care and self-worth; it shows when and how to ask for love and attention, and how to provide it for others. It shows that it is okay to define your needs and ask others to share theirs. In a moment in which community, affection, and generosity are needed more than ever, this book is an indispensable road map. This book will be a guiding light to a healthier mental state amid these troubled times.