What My Father Gave Me

Passionate, compelling essays reveal how daughters see their fathers.Editor Melanie Little brings together seven outstanding women -- including Susan Olding, Jessica Raya and Saleema Nawaz -- to write brilliant, powerful accounts of father-daughter relationships during their teen years.These deeply personal narratives draw readers into raw, real-life experiences. One girl recalls the parade of men in her mother's life until a man named Al unexpectedly becomes the father she never had. Another father's abandonment leads his teen daughter to enter a string of doomed relationships with older men, fuelled by her "pilot light of pure hatred." Another reveals the harrowing secret she guarded as a teen: the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her father.One girl watches as the father she loves and respects struggles on the picket lines during a lockout at work and through an ensuing depression. Another daughter charts her own reckless behavior against that of her father's, in search of a way to break the cycle.Gutsy and honest, these true stories invite readers behind secret doors as they celebrate the power of words to connect to the teen experience.