My first memoir, Poetic License, was published on August 4, 2020, and almost five years later, on April 9, 2025 I had one of the books best events ever. Held at PRINT: A Bookstore and hosted by Finding Our Voices founder Patrisha MacLean, we talked, in community, about the long term harm of sexual abuse, misogyny, and the difficult road for all of us who have experienced it.
Aside from the fact that, as most debut authors feel, I had no idea if anyone would read it or that it would still be a salient read today. There’s an old saying in the business world that if your company lasts for five years, it’s a solid marker that it’s a good chance it’ll be around in ten. So Poetic License has done its thing and I was glad to be speaking with interested and concerned members of the Portland (ME) community.
As I’ve written here, this book has had measurable impact: the women who are now, or have, completed writing their own memoirs because I wrote mine (the count is 12 that I’ve heard of); the multitude of readers who have written and expressed their concerns for me or their commitment to ending child abuse and domestic violence where they live; most personally, and prophetically, the twenty-plus women who wrote to me about their experiences with my dad when they were college or graduate students.
Books go out in the world and find a life of their own. It’s cliche to say that it’s like launching a child into the world, but there’s truth to that. You do the best you can for years, crafting your story, nourishing and protecting it, and then you hope it holds up in the hard, cruel world.
My recent experience with Finding Our Voices at PRINT: A Bookstore provided two profound experiences for me. First, the book came out right after the start of COVID and so all our well-planned, in-person, publicity had to be scrapped as my publicist scrambled to switch to all virtual. This event was like a new birthing—in-person, up close, and in real time. Truly special! To prepare, I reread Poetic License again. I hadn’t needed to do that for recent interviews, but I wanted to for this event. I wanted to feel what I had when I wrote it, now that my second memoir is out, and my third book—a novel—is on the way.
Steeping myself in the story over a few days, I found that it held up just fine. I don’t say this with hubris. I say it with pride and gratitude to all the many people who helped me craft the story. It’s amazing how much goes into a literary book!
The second, and more profound experience I had was in listening to the full room of men and women, and their many questions. Some of the best I’ve heard. Part of that was certainly embedded in how furious we all were that autocratic controls by powerful men are in ascension in this country and that our hard won wins as women are threatened.
This wasn’t a political event (aren’t all events political in some way?) but it sure was hard to avoid any recognition of how absurd, deadly, and morally repugnant it is to see a whole cadre of old white men fear the natural evolution of our country in its colors, identities, and orientations so much that they’re willing to destroy the country for that fear. Or for their own power. And I guess that’s what was riveting to me. How far we still have to go. How arduous it is to constantly defend the rights we’ve fought so hard to obtain.
It is impossible to live in our country today without recognizing where we have come from. And while it feels like most things have only changed for the bad, I was reminded of one system change Poetic License prompted after it came out. I was on a random call to my father’s alma mater in Austin, Minnesota, and learned that alums of his alma mater rallied the high school to take his name off the library.
To think that my story could have that impact was both empowering and humbling. I had not led this cause; I didn’t even know it had happened. But it was a unanimous decision by the school board which wrote (I’m paraphrasing) that the school board “stood with all children and adults whose voices should be heard.” It is one thing to influence the position or opinion of a single person—all good; it’s another to change a whole system—even better.
Why don’t we just take all names off public buildings and let the buildings stand for those who enter them, those who use them, learn from them, and end our bow-down to the mythology of powerful (mostly) men. That said, it was a complex announcement for me to process, but after much reflection I did feel they made the right decision.
If you missed the event and want to watch/listen, here is the YouTube link and a caution that this event occurred three days after I broke my shoulder and I was in pain, which shows occasionally, but hey, authors gotta show up when they gotta show up :-) :
FROM MY STACK
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad
If there’s been a book that got me with its title, this is one. Please, please, please read this book. It isn’t easy or comfortable, but it’s powerful and important. From the jacket, “after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Akkad put out a tweet: One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” The tweet has been viewed well over 10 million times. It echoed my feeling about the War in Vietnam. Twenty years later just about everyone was against it.
The book is a moral grappling with the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter—immigrant detentions and deportations today—and the atrocious murder of nearly everyone in Gaza. His conclusion is raw and vulnerable — that those with privileged boundaries will always keep out those who are outside them, including in “advanced” “democracies”. One of so many lines that slayed me: “No description of the moon, no matter how stunning, how true, reflects as much beauty back into the world as a missile obliterating a family in their home takes out of it.” And this excerpt of a poem by Marwa Helal:
this is where the poets will interject they will say: show don’t tell but that assumes most people can see.
Hush Harbor by Anise Vance
This new book by a Dartmouth grad, was a very good read for me at this time. Though set in the near future, my current book takes place during the social and political upheavals of the 1960s and 70s. This story follows the murder of a Black teenager at the hands of the New Jersey police in a fictional place called Bliss City and the resistance of an entire Black community that holes up on one side of the river, trying to carve out a safe harbor for its people. The leaders of this revolution are siblings with varying beliefs on how to proceed. Hush Harbor can only accessed by underground tunnels that have been used by fugitives for hundreds of years. It is about a people who have lost all hope for peace and prosperity for their own. The characters are terrific, the setting is beautiful, and the anger and frustration at being reviled by others is palpable. The white mayor is soon found to be tied to white supremacists and locks the entire city down, setting up an anticipated conflagration. It’s a high-stakes story about what any of us might sacrifice to find justice. An important addition to my canon.
And on a “happier” note:
All Fours by Miranda July
With July’s nearly cult-like following and that everyone’s talking about it, I picked it up one day and I found the first two-thirds hilarious, wonderfully imaginative, and bold (as George Saunders blurbed: “a tour de force”). I get all the accolades for this book. It speaks to the generation my kids are in about which I care deeply. Fabulous dialog and great scenes. My only real complaint was that I thought it went on too long. The final third, while entertaining and provocative at times, was slower and less powerful for me. But I’ll likely follow Miranda July wherever she goes, just for the all-out entertainment of All Fours.
Three Days in June by Anne Tyler
Honestly I haven’t read a lot of Tyler since first introduced to her decades ago. But I was in a rainy day mood with my broken shoulder in a sling when I walked into Longfellow’s, our oldest indie bookstore in Portland, and there it was in plain sight. Turns out it was a perfect, sweet read, for that moment. What could go wrong when the divorced husband shows up at the ex-wife’s with nowhere to stay, along with his stray cat, and their daughter will be married the next day to a guy who may or may not have just slept with her friend. Plenty of course, and it was short, charming, fun, and moving, all in one quick read. At 155 pages about enough for a rainy afternoon.
Thank you for picking up my books and reading what I have to say.
Happy Summer,
