The Strongbox is a memoir about the lengths I went to in finding my biological father and what I did with the discoveries I made along the way. It opens with two letters between attorneys, written in 1967, in which a matter of $20 per week child support payments is being negotiated. It’s not clear whether the support refers to one child or two—me, my brother, or both of us. That ambiguity is at the heart of this family of origin story. It reads like a detective novel—except instead of solving for a death, it solves for a birth, mine. I wanted to know who my father had been and why he was never a part of my life. When my mother died young and without warning, she took his true identity with her to the grave. However, what she left behind was a metal file box, her “strongbox” as she called it, that held the two attorney letters, bits of random ephemera, and other legal documents that took decades for me to understand. To satisfy a gnawing curiosity I had about my father, I found myself on a long, two-track journey: half self-healing and half seat-of-the-pants sleuthing. The Strongbox is a personal quest story that is full of setbacks, false leads, jaw-dropping discoveries, and heartening triumphs. Throughout my father search, I had one man in mind. As I got closer to the truth, the family dysfunction was made clearer, and my job became healing from generations of hurt. Aside from being a good whodunit, The Strongbox could be appealing to anyone grappling with issues of parental abandonment or in need of an inspiring against-all-odds/triumph-over-adversity read. Furthermore, The Strongbox adds to a larger conversation taking place within the culture today in which the curtain is being pulled back on so many inconvenient truths.    

She Writes Press published The Strongbox in the fall of 2020. It is available through all book purveyors, but in an effort to support independent booksellers, you can find it through Indiebound.org

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