Family Secrets and Dysfunction: Two Women, Two Memoirs

Gretchen Cherington and Linda Murphy Marshall grew up in different locations and in very different families—one on an Ivy League campus in New England; one in the suburbs of St. Louis. Common between them were their powerful, successful, larger-than-life fathers, each wildly admired in his own sphere: Gretchen’s father, literary and academic; Linda’s father, in politics and business. As little girls, both vied for slim attention from their patriarchal fathers, more compelled by their professional lives than by their children. For different reasons, neither Gretchen nor Linda had close sibling relationships to rely on, so they watched and listened and internalized their family dynamics, left to navigate things on their own. Through long arcs of reconciliation with themselves and their backgrounds, each unpacked their experiences, translated what they’d witnessed, and claimed their own powerful selves as adults, through the art of memoir. Peppered with place and time-specific details—like T