About this item
Highlights
- In Ungrieving, a memoir about family dysfunction and estrangement, religious doubt, and complex relationships, Jennifer Stolpa Flatt provides others with the book she needed but couldn't find.
- Author(s): Jennifer Stolpa Flatt
- 280 Pages
- Family + Relationships, Dysfunctional Families
Description
About the Book
A compelling and provocative memoir about emotional abuse, depression, family estrangement, and religious doubt, Ungrieving gives readers a companion for when death brings both loss and a sense of relief.
Book Synopsis
In Ungrieving, a memoir about family dysfunction and estrangement, religious doubt, and complex relationships, Jennifer Stolpa Flatt provides others with the book she needed but couldn't find. The insights will resonate with those who have experienced family divisions or who support those who do, and those who struggle to let go of the relationships they wanted but never had.
After a lifetime of emotional abuse, verbal attacks, and controlling behaviors, including a four-year estrangement from a man she called "Daddy" despite not feeling the warmth the nickname implies, her father's death left her struggling to make sense of their fractured relationship.
She felt both a sense of relief and a profound sadness:
I don't miss him and I feel guilty admitting that.
Sometimes I do miss him. And that confuses me.
Through relatable and compelling stories and essays, Flatt places readers in key moments throughout her family's journey, demonstrating how she, her sister, and her mom suffered as collateral damage due to her dad's untreated depression. The memoir artfully weaves in passages from her dad's journals, allowing her to explore his pain, his dreams, and his parenting choices.
Flatt also explores how Catholicism, changing her religious faith, music, mental illness, counseling, and feminism both united and separated her from her father.
Ungrieving challenges readers to think carefully about what we say to ourselves and what we say to others in moments of grief. Flatt's journey also helps ease the guilt readers might feel around strained relationships, questioning religion, or mental health concerns as readers learn to see themselves and others as individuals, and not only in relationship to others.
Review Quotes
Jennifer Stolpa Flatt's memoir gives powerful testimony to the hope embedded in seeking help with depression, and in the complex ongoing process of ungrieving.
-Dr. Peggy (Margaret) Rozga, author of Two Hundred Nights and One Day and 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate
Compelling, compassionate, and brave, Ungrieving explores the heartbreaking question of how to mourn the death of a difficult parent. As Jennifer Stolpa Flatt strives to better understand her father and her relationship with him, she repeatedly asks what it means to be a parent, a child, and a human being. Her unflinching answers are thoughtful, honest, sometimes wryly funny, and always illuminating. As a reader, I cried and learned much more than I expected to, and I was grateful to spend time in the author's insightful company.
-Dr. Carrie Shipers, associate professor at Rhode Island College and author of Grief Land: Poems
A deeply personal account of the author's struggle to make sense of her relationship with her father after his death, Ungrieving will resonate with anyone who has suffered complicated grief, codependent relationships, and skewed family dynamics due to mental illness.
-The Reverend Katherine Finegan, bishop of the Northern Great Lakes Synod, ELCA
Our grief is as complicated and difficult as the lives of those we've lost. Thank heavens for writers like Jennifer Flatt, who bear witness to grief's reality, teach forbearance with our anger, and model self-love in death's aftermath. Ungrieving is the conflicted mourner's trusty companion.
-Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, author of Swinging on the Garden Gate and Writing the Sacred Journey
Ungrieving focuses on the personal story and reflections of Dr. Jennifer Flatt as she processes the complex feeling of mourning the loss of her abusive father. In her thoughtful, beautifully written, and brave sharing of her personal stories, she provides a safe space for other people who suffer from mental illness personally and who are in relationships with those with mental illness to reinterpret those relationships and try to separate the person from the disease. She reminds us that we are all survivors of the various abusive relationships in our lives, even the ones that we have with ourselves.
-Katie Feilen, PhD, educator, and scientist
Jennifer Stolpa Flatt's courage in sharing with vulnerability and honesty the raw truths of generational trauma will help many individuals to find their own courage.
-Christine Nicklaus, MS, MS-Ed, NCC, Licensed Professional Counselor (WI & MI), Nicklaus Counseling Center, S.C.