Therapist's Daughter

2024 International Book Awards Finalist in Poetry "Gail Cloud's unique memoir is written in semi-poetic style of the Greek classics. The reader watches her dance her way past complicated emotional roadblocks, increasingly creative, determined, graceful, and wise." -Susan Margolis Balk, Founding Director of HateBrakers/New Conscience; Retired Columbia University Professor & Former Literary Editor at Playboy Therapist's Daughter delves into one woman's internal perceptions of her enigmatic father. Gail Cloud's memoir in verse chronicles the cost and consequences we suffer when we are taught not to believe in us but to believe in another-followed by the powerful journey back to ourselves-where we see and own our truths, and create lives of integrity and meaning. In Part One: HIM, she paints a sensory portrait of who her father was, not just to her, but as a complex soul we may come to empathize with through her memories of good times at breakfast, and his simple love of baseball. Tenderness offers contrast to early confusing, traumatic experiences affecting many father-daughter bonds. In Part Two: ME, we meet Gail the daughter, the dancer, as well as her kindreds, and what it is like to be lied to while believing the lie. In Part Three: COMING UNDONE, we witness her dad's demise, his fall into dementia, and her virgin encounter with the truth. In Part Four: MY DANCE, this poet's verse carries us on the wings of her growth and indepen-dance, as she pirouettes to a place of acceptance and offers us all a new story of flourishing within.