I'm So Glad You're Here: A Memoir

by Pamela Gay

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631528743
Publisher:	She Writes Press
Publication date:	05/26/2020
Pages:	168
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

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.

Table of Contents

Prelude

Turkey Day 3

Flashback: Memory Slide 7

Shock Treatment 9

A Change of Scenery 11

Decades Later: 1995

Standing on a Curb 15

Help 17

Welcome to Sun Ray Homes 20

It's Time 28

Meat vs. Vegetables 32

Voila! 34

Going Downhill 36

Suspicion 42

Death 45

Let's Get This Straight 51

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay 56

Days of Our Lives 59

Valentino 62

The Vie wing 65

I'm So Glad You're Here 68

The Service 71

Flounder Florentine 73

Turkey Day 2 76

X-Ray 79

I Took My Mother to Church 81

The White Cliffs of Dover 84

Heartache 87

Good Luck with Your Sister 91

Rumors 95

Popsicle Anyone? 97

Healing from Trauma

A Participant Observer's Report 101

Perception

"What Goes Around Comes Around" 115

"Once Again, Let Me Say, What Goes Around Comes Around" 118

Postscript (January 2014) 120

Postscript (February 2014) 123

And the Word Was Good 124

Postlude

The Way It Is 127

Backstory: My Mother's Storage Problem 128

Flashback: A Letter from My Mother 131

Flashback: A Conversation with My Father 135

Pretty Good for a Mother 139

Grief, Renewal, and Hope 142

Endnotes 145

Acknowledgments 153

Editorial Reviews

2020 Best Book Awards Finalist in Narrative: Non-Fiction

“In this debut memoir, a father’s death reunites a mother and daughter but reignites familial tensions. Gay is a perceptive and compassionate narrator who manages to explore the gaps in everyone’s stories, including her own. 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

“An inherently interesting and impressively candid personal story . . .”
—Midwest Book Review

“In I’m So Glad You’re Here, Pamela Gay takes us on a psychological journey through which she heals her own trauma while discovering compassion and empathy. Gay’s prose is lyrical and moving. I guarantee once you start reading, you won’t be able to put this book down.”
—Maria Mazziotti Gillan, author of American Book Award winner All That Lies Between Us

“An honest and moving account built upon her father’s mental illness and death and her yearning to be close to her mother. Gay details the repercussions of his illness on her family members and herself, giving us a brave and close-up view of how she coped with grief and trauma.”
—Roberta Allen, author of The Princess of Herself and The Dreaming Girl

“In this psychological travelogue, Pamela Gay fractures the surface of memory to peer into the depths of a family in all its complex dysfunction: shock treatment, alcoholism, feuding siblings, hissing turkey dinners, home burial, and yes, recipes—a surprising semiotic assemblage masterfully crafted at the crossroads of tragedy and comedy.”
—Mindy Lewis, author of Life Inside: A Memoir

“Pamela Gay dramatically illustrates that while wounds we carry from growing up in fractured families stay with us, they do not have to control us.”
—Susan Anderson, author of The Journey from Abandonment to Healing

From the Publisher

2020-03-23
In this debut memoir, a father’s death reunites a mother and daughter but reignites familial tensions.

Gay remembers with precise detail the moment that her father was escorted out of her family’s Florida house, strapped to a stretcher. It was 1963, and the author was 18 years old, home from college for Thanksgiving. Gay’s father had suffered a mental breakdown that would forever change the family dynamic. For years to follow, her dad underwent treatment, including electroshock therapy, and was in and out of hospitals. Later, in the 1990s, while on sabbatical from her professorship in upstate New York, Gay flew down to Florida to spend time with her mother while her father spent his final days in assisted living. The author, the youngest child in a family with three other siblings, attempted to pick up the pieces of her fractured family after her father’s death and help her ailing mother. She came to recognize her mother’s hardships throughout her life—as a young child abandoned by both parents, and as a wife in a challenging marriage—and attempted to rebuild her relationships with her siblings. Meanwhile, her mother dealt with her grief by drinking and closing herself off from her children. Gay is a perceptive and compassionate narrator who manages to explore the gaps in everyone’s stories, including her own. 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. She also writes of how she took on the task of breaking “the cycle of family dysfunction” and continued to reach out to her siblings after their mother’s death.

A tender, astute remembrance of overcoming grief and coming to terms with a parent’s flaws.

Kirkus Reviews