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Poetic License: A Memoir (Paperback)

$16.95
On Our Shelves Now (email to confirm availability)
Staff Reviews
Plainfield resident Gretchen Cherington has written an amazing memoir. She skillfully draws her reader in with clear writing, insightful awareness and a flair for story telling that is rare for a first time author. I was immediately caught up with this account of growing up in an academic family that had a constant stream of famous poets and writers through their door. The daughter of Richard Eberhart, the United States Poet Laureate in 1959 as well as a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1966, Cherington's was a life of comfort, but beneath the surface lay the truth of what being the daughter of a deeply flawed man meant for her. Cherington is a born storyteller and she has wonderful stories to tell. "Poetic License" is a sad and painful tale at times, but also a delightful one as the reader is taken intimately into Cherington’s world. I greatly enjoyed it.
— From Penny's PicksDescription
At age forty, with two growing children and a new consulting company she'd recently founded, Gretchen Cherington, daughter of Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Richard Eberhart, faced a dilemma: Should she protect her parents' well-crafted family myths while continuing to silence her own voice? Or was it time to challenge those myths and speak her truth--even the unbearable truth that her generous and kind father had sexually violated her? In this powerful memoir, aided by her father's extensive archives at Dartmouth College and interviews with some of her father's best friends, Cherington candidly and courageously retraces her past to make sense of her father and herself. From the women's movement of the '60s and the back-to-the-land movement of the '70s to Cherington's consulting work through three decades with powerful executives to her eventual decision to speak publicly in the formative months of #MeToo, Poetic License is one woman's story of speaking truth in a world where, too often, men still call the shots.