I'm So Glad You're Here

Im So Glad Youre Here is the story of a family disrupted by ramifications of a fathers 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 fathers funeral, she witnesses her sundered familys inability to gather together. Eventually, she is diagnosed with PTSD of abandonment and treated with EMDR therapyand finally begins to heal. Poignant and powerful, Im So Glad Youre Here is Gays 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 usa reflective journey that will inspire readers to think about their own relational lives.