Susan Ehrlich
DARLING DAUGHTER
A Memoir
My parents were both artists — my mother an Impressionist painter, my father a sculptor who worked fifty years in a basement studio. Both had been abandoned as small children; both had dreams the world took from them. My mother told me her stories over and over, until I could not tell her memories from my own. My father said nothing. Without meaning to, they gave me their pain to carry and made me responsible for keeping them whole.
It took me most of my life to understand what I had inherited, and how to put it down. DARLING DAUGHTER is the story of that reckoning — a Paris salon at nineteen, a mirror in Los Angeles at thirty-five, an enormous green bug on a car window at midnight, a letter from a stranger living in my childhood home, and finally a riverboat on the Willamette, where the last surviving veterans of my father's bomb group told me the stories he never could.
DARLING DAUGHTER is complete at 71,000 words and is currently seeking representation.
A Memoir
My parents were both artists — my mother an Impressionist painter, my father a sculptor who worked fifty years in a basement studio. Both had been abandoned as small children; both had dreams the world took from them. My mother told me her stories over and over, until I could not tell her memories from my own. My father said nothing. Without meaning to, they gave me their pain to carry and made me responsible for keeping them whole.
It took me most of my life to understand what I had inherited, and how to put it down. DARLING DAUGHTER is the story of that reckoning — a Paris salon at nineteen, a mirror in Los Angeles at thirty-five, an enormous green bug on a car window at midnight, a letter from a stranger living in my childhood home, and finally a riverboat on the Willamette, where the last surviving veterans of my father's bomb group told me the stories he never could.
DARLING DAUGHTER is complete at 71,000 words and is currently seeking representation.
I am a retired speech-language pathologist. For more than thirty years, I worked with adults who had lost the ability to speak after strokes and brain injuries, helping them find a way back to language. I hold a master's degree in speech-language pathology from the University of Wisconsin and spent my career in acute care hospitals.
In 1992, I published Language Jackpot, a board game I designed so that stroke survivors at every level of impairment could play and practice together.
I grew up in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, the daughter of two artists, and have lived in Los Angeles since 1988.
DARLING DAUGHTER is my first book.
CONTACT: susan@susanehrlich.com
In 1992, I published Language Jackpot, a board game I designed so that stroke survivors at every level of impairment could play and practice together.
I grew up in Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin, the daughter of two artists, and have lived in Los Angeles since 1988.
DARLING DAUGHTER is my first book.
CONTACT: susan@susanehrlich.com