I'm So Glad You're Here

<i>I'm So Glad You're Here</i> 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.<br> 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>I'm So Glad You're Here</i> 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.