About My New Memoir: “Daddy”

When I was 28, my father shot my mother as she was sleeping in my childhood bedroom. He then turned the gun on himself.

As I sat in the hospital room as my mother was pronounced dead, my friends and family seemed to have only one question: “How could this happen?” This book is an attempt at an answer.

Daddy is the story of my trauma, substance abuse, and lifelong dedication to PTSD research, but it also turns out to be the story of America.

Central to the book is the question of personal responsibility in the perpetration of domestic abuse and other forms of violence-including war.

• What happens to a person as they experience trauma?

• Are they in control as they are being traumatized?

• When the trauma cycle results in a survivor becoming abusive later in life, are they fully in control of their actions?

• Why do some victims become abusers and others don’t?

There are no easy answers to these questions, but in Daddy, I explore possible conclusions through the history of my own trauma, my father’s upbringing and time-fighting in World War II, the United States’ troubling past of slavery, misogyny, war, and systemic oppression, and the varied definitions of PTSD and conceptions of trauma.