My Father’s Love, Volume II: The Legacy

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.