Your Absence Belongs to Me

The author lost her father to cancer when she was 16 years old. Before he died, he set out to give his daughter the tools she needed to become a free-thinking, confident, cultured, improper, disruptive, selfish feminist who has better things to do than apologize.

Today this thirty-something woman has come to see how she had these values and this personality drilled into her in a hurry. As she seeks to explore the building blocks of her self in this intimate essay, her quest leads her to interview other people who have grown up in less than conventional circumstances.

“When you’ve had a certain way of being dictated to you, how can you figure out your true identity if you don’t put the person you’ve always been behind you?”