I’M SO GLAD YOU’RE HERE: A MemoirBy Pamela Gay
On Sale May 26, 2020
She Writes Press
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ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THE BOOK:
“Pamela Gay has written a poignant and powerful story about her journey from PTSD of Abandonment to healing and renewal. “—Susan Anderson, author of The Journey from Abandonment to Healing
"As an English scholar and professor, she demonstrates a firm knowledge of how memoirs can be unreliable records of the past. She uses poetry, journal entries, and literary epigraphs to create an engaging metanarrative that explores how writing was vital to her process of overcoming trauma." —Kirkus Reviews
Pamela will discuss:
- What advice would you give those who are caring for aging parents in this time?
- Why would you say sibling relationships are so important as families grow older?
- What would you tell people who are on a journey to find the best type of therapy for them?
- How did growing up with a parent who was mentally ill affect your adult life?
- What is your experience with misdiagnosis?
- How did you overcome your life's greatest obstacles?
- What would you say are the first steps to moving past trauma?
- How has writing played a role in your healing process?
ABOUT THE BOOK:
I’m So Glad You’re Here is the story of a family disrupted by ramifications of a father’s mental illness. The memoir opens with a riveting account of Gay, age eighteen, witnessing her father being bound in a straitjacket and carried out of the house on a stretcher. The trauma she experiences escalates when, after her father has had electroshock treatments at a state mental hospital, her parents leave her in a college dorm room and move from Massachusetts to Florida without her. She feels abandoned. Both her parents have gone missing.
Decades later, when Gay and her three much-older siblings show up for their father’s funeral, she witnesses her sundered family’s inability to gather together. Eventually, she is diagnosed with PTSD of abandonment and treated with EMDR therapy―and finally begins to heal. Poignant and powerful, I’m So Glad You’re Here is Gay’s exploration of the idea that while the wounds we carry from growing up in fractured families stay with us, they do not have to control us―a reflective journey that will inspire readers to think about their own relational lives.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Pamela Gay is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) award in creative nonfiction and an Independent eBook Award for her memoir Homecoming, which combined text, image, and sound. An installation based on this memoir and sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) included artifacts. Gay’s writing has been published in Brevity, Iowa Review, Paterson Literary Review, Midway Journal, Monkeybicycle, Grey Sparrow, Vestal Review, and other literary journals, as well as two anthologies. Gay is a professor emerita at Binghamton University, State University of New York, where she taught courses in flash memoir and flash fiction. She lives in Upstate New York. Her memoir, I'm So Glad You're Here comes out May 26. See more at her website pamela-gay.com.
