Fatherless Women: How We Change After We Lose Our Dads

"Elegant prose ... sheds new light on the father-daughter dynamic"
-Boston magazine

Praise for Fatherless WOMEN

"If it can be said about a book on loss, Fatherless Women is a pleasure to read. Clea Simon is a warm, honest, intelligent, and trustworthy guide, not only for grieving women but for the men who support them. Simon's insights about father-daughter relationships are profound."
-Neil Chethik, author of FatherLoss

"Clea Simon deepens our understanding of the complicated emotions daughters feel about fathers, both during life and especially after death. This book will help heal rifts and set stuck energies free."
-Beth Witrogen McLeod, author of Caregiving:
The Spiritual Journey of Love, Loss, and Renewal

"Unusually candid and often provocative . . . Simon's book is immensely thought-provoking about a topic that all of us will face."
-Pauline Boss, Ph.D., author of Ambiguous Loss:
Learning to Live with Unresolved Grief

There is a special bond between a father and a daughter, and when that bond is broken by death, a woman's life can change in profound and unexpected ways. Clea Simon, critically acclaimed author of Mad House, explores this crucial meeting point of grief and growth by delving into her own experience and those of other women to paint an illuminating portrait of the father-daughter relationship and its lifelong ramifications. Filled with moving stories of real women, this poignant, comforting, and insightful book paves the way for all women to make peace with the past, with the adults they have become, and to courageously face the question: what happens next?

The bond between father and daughter can be one of the strongest either family member will experience in his or her lifetime. In Fatherless Women, Clea Simon, a writer for the Boston Globe, examines challenges daughters face when this relationship is severed by the death of the father. With all but one chapter focusing on women who have lost their fathers after adulthood, Fatherless Women traces the father-daughter relationship and how it manifests as a girl grows up, how it affects her, and what that relationship leaves behind when it's gone. Simon describes some of her own experiences and discusses, with an emphasis on pervasive trends, the immediate changes that can take place within one or two years after the death of a father. By delving into every aspect of a woman's life, both personal and professional, Simon covers a multitude of topics, including how women mourn in order to resolve father-daughter issues, changing mother-daughter relationships, trends of family commitment following this loss, challenges marriages face after the loss, refining needs in response to death, and how goals can change after losing a father. The book ends with "The Journey over Time," describing how bereaved daughters often incorporate elements of their fathers into their own lives and families over time. --Rhonda Langdon