BOOK CLUB
UPCOMING DISCUSSIONS
In-person discussion at Print: A Bookstore, Portland, Maine, with Gretchen Cherington, author of Poetic License.
Wednesday Apr 09, 2025
6:30 pm - 8:00 pm - EST
Memoir Discussion To Center Around Abuse By Famous Father
Gretchen Cherington is guest of the Finding Our Voices Book Club in Portland
PORTLAND ME—Acclaimed author Gretchen Cherington will discuss her memoir, Poetic License, with Finding Our Voices CEO and founder Patrisha McLean on Wednesday April 9, 2025, at PRINT: A Bookstore, in Portland.
The 6:30 to 8 p.m. Finding Our Voices Book Club event is free and open to the public, and refreshments will be on hand.
Gretchen Cherington’s award-winning memoir, Poetic License, chronicles abuse by her father, the Pulitzer Prize winning, and U.S. Poet Laureate, Richard Eberhart. Their complicated relationship is set amidst the swirl of her parents’ close friendships with literary luminaries including Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg, and Anne Sexton.
Cherington kept silent for decades about abuse by her father that profoundly impacted her relationships with everyone in her family as well as her early loves and career.
In Poetic License, she digs deep to understand her own past as an adoring child of her father, while, as a woman, circling questions about our collective reverence for heroes, the mythology of powerful men, and speaking her truth to power. She confronts the question: Should we protect our family’s or our community’s myths while continuing to silence our own voices?
Cherington, who divides her time between Portland and Brooksville, will also speak about her second memoir, winner of the 2024 Maine Literary Award, The Butcher, the Embezzler, and the Fall Guy. This book takes her back further to her father’s parents in Minnesota and early seeds of familial secreting and questionable relationships.
This will be the first in-person meeting of the Finding Our Voices Book Club. For three years, McLean has discussed memoir and fiction through the lens of domestic abuse with such authors as Sarah Perry and Andre Dubus lll.
“I am beyond thrilled,” said Patrisha McLean of Finding Our Voices, “to be able to converse in public with one of my favorite writers about being under the sway of powerful narcissists, breaking the silence and inter-generational cycle of abuse, and writing and living in Maine."
There will be opportunity to talk with Finding Our Voices survivors and Cherington after the discussion. Both of Cherington's books will be available for purchase and signing.
Finding Our Voices is the grassroots nonprofit breaking the silence and stigma of domestic abuse and providing peer support and meaningful resources to Maine women survivors. To sign up for the Finding Our Voices online book club visit https://bookclubs.com/finding-our-voices/join/. For more information about Finding Our Voices visit https://findingourvoices.net/
Photo Credit: Gretchen Cherington, of Brooksville and Portland, is the guest of the April 9 Finding Our Voices Book Club discussion in Portland. She will talk about her memoir that involves abuse by father, Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet Richard Eberhart. Photo provided by the author.
WHO CAN JOIN
Our Book Club is open to women who identify as survivors and those who do not.
WHAT IT IS
The online Finding Our Voices Book Club is facilitated by Patrisha McLean and Mary Lou Smith, and meets about six times a year.
WHAT WE READ
We look at life through the lens of domestic abuse, because once you see it domestic abuse really is everywhere.
The authors of the books below have joined our online discussion!
BOOK RECOMMENDATIONS
Please support your local bookstore!
Lundy Bancroft’s “Why Does He Do That” is the bible to understanding who it is exploiting the love you had for them, and why they won’t change. A Finding Our Voices donates copies of this book to our sisters, inscribed by survivors whose photos are featured on our posters and bookmarks like Christine pictured here.
The Road to After is about the 10 year captivity of Rebekah Lowell (seen here hanging up her Finding Our Voices poster in Biddeford) as seen through the eyes of her children, and how the family healed through nature and art expressed in verse and illustration.
Memoirs of Partner Abuse
Parent as Abuser
Child Custody/Court Reform
Great Overviews
Understanding Narcissists
More Patrisha Picks
I met a group of women who’d been in violent relationships, years ago—when the book first came out. They’d all read the book, and one of them said: ‘How did you get inside my fuckin’ head?’ It’s the best review I ever got.
—Author Roddy Doyle in letter to Patrisha, March 2019
