Emotionally riveting memoir from Jennifer Flatt

 

Ungrieving, a memoir of emotional abuse, loss, and relief
Jennifer Stolpa Flatt
Memoir, 281 pp.
2024, Mission Point Press
 
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$.7.95 ebook
$16.95 print
 
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About the Book
In Ungrieving, a memoir about family dysfunction and estrangement, religious doubt, and complex relationships, Jennifer Stolpa Flatt provides others with the book she needed but couldn’t find. The insights will resonate with those who have experienced family divisions or who support those who do, and those who struggle to let go of the relationships they wanted but never had.

After a lifetime of emotional abuse, verbal attacks, and controlling behaviors, including a four-year estrangement from a man she called “Daddy,” despite not feeling the warmth the nickname implies, her father’s death left her struggling to make sense of their fractured relationship.

She felt both a sense of relief and a profound sadness: "I don’t miss him and I feel guilty admitting that. Sometimes I do miss him. And that confuses me."
 
My Review
Ungrieving is a memoir as much as a journey to healing. Told early on in past and present events that set off her father’s instability during the author’s childhood and post-funeral reminiscences as an adult, Jennifer Flatt tells her story of growing up in an abusive environment. I lost my father a couple of years ago and can’t help comparing my own journey through emotional abuse, loss, and relief, although maybe not exactly in that order. You put yourself in a peculiarly vulnerable position when you share memories, your truth as you know it. Flatt’s relationship with her sister Karen and friends who support her story make her story relevant. Flatt shares that her father had mental health issues that were mostly untreated. Her childhood memories of Dad and Mom fighting in front of and sometimes with the kids are carefully couched within her belief that he wanted to protect and nurture his children and family but couldn’t separate his inner child. Later in his adult life he did try therapy and medication, but it didn’t last. He couldn’t move past his personal feeling and accused others of being considering him a failure, or “dumb”; words he might have had ingrained from a childhood he never chose to share.
 
Jennifer and Karen grew up trying to keep peace at all costs. Particularly memorable for me is an afternoon when Jennifer is eight years old and Dad insists on having family game afternoon…but with games that are long and difficult to play in which he tends to defeat everyone. When the girls would rather play after one such game, Dad melts down with grievances about everything. While Mom and Karen take turns standing up to him and apologizing and attempting to appease, the whole thing ends in all the girls crying and Dad demanding a group hug stating that the family who fights together makes them stronger and more blessed. It’s hard not to be horrified. On the flipside Flatt shares many moments of empathy when Dad practiced as a lay minister and supported Flatt’s questioning church doctrine. She is able to express resentment when others knew her dad as a helpful and positive influence, without being aware of his damaging side. She realizes his problems were only one aspect of his personality and recognizes her father was in between a hero and a villain.
 
“One of my talents is post-conversational paranoia,” she says. As a child she developed fears of encroaching on her father’s space, fear of revealing a medical condition due to financial issues, fear for her mother’s health, fear of the future, struggling to be a better person, falling into the darkness of the soul. A diagnosis of clinical depression and treatment made a difference but it took decades. Flatt entertained wishes her mom would have taken the girls and left. Later, her mother admits the same, though the marriage was not a total failure or complete nightmare. The passing of Flatt’s father to cancer also sparked an interest in getting to know her mother in a different way.
 
Ungrieving is a great, helpful memoir especially for those who need to work through the trauma of being parented by people who tried, couldn’t help themselves, didn’t know better, were damaged themselves, and loved us even while hurting us. When Flatt finds her father’s words of relief at his own father’s death, she says, “I can’t help but think how alike we are, how similar our paths. I understand this ungrieving of a parent. He understands mine for him. My inheritance includes this understanding of grief that isn’t.” And it’s okay. Highly recommended.
 
 About the Author
Jennifer Stolpa Flatt is an educator, writer, and church singer and musician with decades of experience playing the organ, piano, and trumpet. Although baptized and confirmed as a Catholic, Jennifer has been a practicing member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) since 2004. Previously a professor of English and Spanish, Jennifer currently serves as the vice president of student services for a technical college in Wisconsin. Jennifer is also a reader, baseball fan, and mom to two boys, Anton and Edward. She lives in Marinette, Wisconsin, with her husband, Jason, in the Victorian home they are restoring.