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My Father's Love, Vol I: Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl

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Proust took to a cork-lined study to write his life. Sharon Doubiago took to a van, Psyche, which she has lived in and worked from for many years, traveling the length of the West Coast. Along the way she has written 11 books of poetry and two books of stories, one of which, "The Book of Seeing With One's Own Eyes", won an Oregon Book Award and is listed by the Oregon Culture Heritage society as one of the 100 most significant books in Oregon from 1800-2000.

Her latest publication, "My Father's Love, Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl", is part one of a two-part literary memoir. It covers her childhood and formative years, and deals unflinchingly with the incest that dominated her childhood and left physical and emotional scars. In Sharon, it led also to an inner life where everything was recorded, lest she and her own reality be swept away.

It's all here in My Father's Love-- the culture of Los Angeles in the 1950s, the family history that went back generations to a place where incest was an unspoken but tolerated phenomenon, and the double and triple messages conveyed by family, religion and the culture of Hollywood. It's a rich, complex and compelling narrative that utilizes family documents, letters and diaries, and moves back and forth between Sharon the adult narrator and the voice of the child Sharon, a voice that is stunningly fresh and alive. It's as though Sharon spent her childhood making a movie with her child's heart and eye, and hid it away for safekeeping until now.

"My Father's Love" is a groundbreaking work that sheds new light on the nature of memory and forgetting, and on the interplay between culture and the individual psyche.

With great respect for the honesty and 'givingness' of the author.

The narrative completely dragged me into the crazy and puzzling world of this little girl. It is an invitation to enter the disturbing world in which she was growing up.

The historic mentions surrounds readers by her outside world while at the same time pulls them into the inner storm she was trying to understand. She was fighting her own war, trying to survive from drowning in her dangerous environment. All of her 'news spots' are related to either war or some child's tragedy, drawing a parallel to what she was going through.

This book is a terrific accomplishment. That she not only survived the constant terror, but moved forward with her life is wonderful, courageous. I like the way she moved in and out of consciousness, and the grandmother's entries. The lineage... American History indeed. A poet, a writer from a way back line of poets and writers.

A breath of hope!

'My Father's Love' is an extraordinary and beautiful book. Its primal landscape is so deeply lived and imagined - the author effectively reinhabits the psychic territory of her childhood, articulating the (once inarticulate) child's perspective, positioning the past as a present and living phenomenon - it is a radically poetic approach to writing memoir. Fantasies, dreams, and even unknown factors are accorded the same status as facts, starting with the image of the drowned man before she was born, a fantastic, haunting, completely original far-out thing like a tarot card at the beginning of her life. It speaks a sort of defiant subjectivity, or a generous subjectivity I should say, since she really does the spadework when it comes to researching the objective details and is especially generous to others, including those others who contradict her story. The portrait of her relationship with her mother is completely heartbreaking. The love she feels, the impossibility of the situation, the horrible moment when she stops sewing the dress and the house gets dirty, the episodes of impasse and betrayal. The way she talks about people not talking about things, not being able to talk, not even being able to look at one another for fear of recognition; the pretense of not knowing that what her father was doing was wrong, the dumb blonde act, how like hanging from a precipice by a thread that was, how excruciating, how true! The 'Sharon this, Sharon that' chapter, with its mindnumbing list of criticisms absorbed whole and suddenly regurgitated is a small, disenchanted poem all by itself. But most extraordinary of all is the huge love inscribed at the center of the book, not just love for her family but for the world and, in the best possible way, for herself, as a child, a woman, a body, an imagination, a heart. It is a sort of spiritual document in this respect. For those of us who have similar radioactive memories this will be an essential book, but it is written for anybody who has an ear for and an interest in how expression might be brought to seemingly inexpressible emotional terrain.

I just finished reading Sharon Doubiago's My Father's Love, Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl, Volume I. It's a truly American, specifically Californian, story of growing up in the `40's and `50's- the values and mores of that time- told in the voice of the child Doubiago was but with all the wisdom of the woman she has become. The mixture of passion, innocence and the intimacy of the voice Doubiago develops for this book is almost staggering. As soon as I read the last word I felt bereft: I wanted MORE (there will be a second volume, and soon, I hope). The feeling is not bad: it just means I "lived" the book while reading it and now I miss the child, that young girl I felt so intimately involved with for the reading. It also means that the voice came across so authentic in the reading that I really did "live "it while reading it and the full impact of the writing was really affecting.
Doubiago tells as horrific story of both mother and father at how they sexualized her from infancy on, the father brutally, the mother obliviously. Natural boundaries were broken, crossed, shoved out of the way. The father was both mean and petty, the mother both blind and complaisant, and an enabler to him. But with eyes firmly closed to it. And we, the readers, understand how this can happen through this story. Being jealous of your own children has got to be the height of pettiness and both of these parents were horribly guilty of that.
The voice of the child in the earlier sections of the book seems almost Joycean: the language play, and a kind of Joycean consciousness in regard to the language. It's what I hear in Nursery Rhymes and in a lot of Joyce. Something about the consciousness of the child and the understanding of language playing with language a child has in the learning of language. A lot of writers have tried to write in that voice of the young child and failed but this one works brilliantly to my ear.
And, since I am Doubiago's age, almost exactly, how I relived some of my own childhood in the book. A deep memory of mine is sitting by the radio, waiting for the news on the hour every hour to find out if they have found little Kathy in the well she fell in, and my sorrow when they finally got to her, dead. The end of WW II and the river of cars streaming by all honking horns, And the Korean War,the Rosenberg's- how shocked I was that they would execute a mother, Adlai Stevenson, who was the hope of my parents and hers, the recurring chorus of little girls murdered in the news, again and again, like a refrain that keeps coming back, cut up and put in little parts in separate sewers. The war on girl-ness. My parents, like Doubiago's, keep abreast of the times and talked about it all, and I was aware of what was happening even before I started reading the newspaper.
As was Doubiago. This book is important for her unique telling of the story of sexual abuse, but also for the specificity of American life for a girlchild in the `40s and `50s.

Judith Roche

Sharon Doubiago writes with courage, poetry and lyricism as she reveals, in fragments of memory, retrospection and insight, the complex and horrifying experience of a childhood marred by sexual abuse at the hands of her father. Weaving the chronology of her childhood together with dream-like recollections of single moments, she plunges the reader into the interior life-- confusion, guilt and shame --of the young girl, burdens that accompany her into adulthood. In doing so, Doubiago reminds us why this story, and others like it, must be told.

Let's be glad that Sharon Doubiago didn't become a child star
like she could have been. Instead she writes and weaves a tale
of shocking revelations involving love, death, incest and nearly
everything in between. This book, "My Father's Love," should
be a required reading text in every Womens Studies Dept.
in every university! It is an outstanding, relevant and truly
necessary documentation and testament to events usually
not discussed. A must have for any library! Bravo, Sharon!

Having survived hell as a girl, she expresses herself through verse. "My Father's Love: Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl" tells the story of Sharon Doubiago, as she reflects on the harshness of her past life. A childhood of sexual abuse where everyday was a new test of torment, she lives through her past once more for the reader to give a glimpse of how some people deal with trauma. "My Father's Love" is Having survived hell as a girl, she expresses herself through verse. "My Father's Love: Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl" tells the story of Sharon Doubiago, as she reflects on the harshness of her past life. A childhood of sexual abuse where everyday was a new test of torment, she lives through her past once more for the reader to give a glimpse of how some people deal with trauma. "My Father's Love" is an interesting and very recommended read that should not be ignored.

Poet Sharon Doubiago tells the story of her father's incestuous love and the impact this violation of herself as a young girl had on each member of her family.

Ellen Bass says Doubiago's work is an "...accomplishment of memory, courage, perseverance, and healing...This is a powerful and heart-breaking book,
an important contribution to our understanding of incest and survival."

In the age of Prejean and Palin, this book is about what really matters, the truth of the darker underside of the American family and how this awful truth reverberates in our culture to our great detriment as a nation and as a people.

The memoir 'My Father's Love', though factual and documented, is the literary equal of 'Call It Sleep' by Henry Roth. It utilizes stream of consciousness lyricism to reinhabit the consciousness of a child--the author's younger self. The narrative captures the time and place surrounding the suffering and eventual deliverance through artistic honesty of the author, Sharon Doubiago, a very great poet. This feeling for background is characteristic of classic literature.

In reading the family saga, I re-experienced the 1940's and '50's Southern California roads, fields, orchards, and oilwells, the neon-lit bar signs and painted respectably neat family homes, the now forgotten historical background to the personal theme of a defenseless child's despair at the unnameable reality of her life, incest.

It was her fate to triumph over the facts in a kind of Ulyssean relentlessness to find meaning and understanding. She did. It is a tale marked by loneliness and moral perseverance. She never backed down from life. There are passages here about family complexity and wrong-doing that have never been written in any American sociology or fiction. In that sense, 'My Father's Love' is unique in American letters. I believe this memoir will outlive the movements to discredit the violations she and others have known. In giving voice to that truthful history, she honored her father and mother by a sense of justice as well as of compassion. In the Bible she studied as a child, justice and mercy was a single word.