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

(Paperback)

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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 tre

Reviews

2020 Best Book Awards Finalist in Narrative: Non-Fiction

In this debut memoir, a fathers death reunites a mother and daughter but reignites familial tensions. Gay is a perceptive and compassionate narrator who manages to explore the gaps in everyones 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 Im So Glad Youre Here, Pamela Gay takes us on a psychological journey through which she heals her own trauma while discovering compassion and empathy. Gays prose is lyrical and moving. I guarantee once you start reading, you wont 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 fathers 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, recipesa 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

Author Bio

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. Gays 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.