Poetic License

At age forty, with two growing children and a new consulting company shed recently founded, Gretchen Cherington, daughter of Pulitzer Prizewinning poet Richard Eberhart, faced a dilemma: Should she protect her parents well-crafted family myths while continuing to silence her own voice? Or was it time to challenge those myths and speak her trutheven the unbearable truth that her generous and kind father had sexually violated her? In this powerful memoir, aided by her fathers extensive archives at Dartmouth College and interviews with some of her fathers best friends, Cherington candidly and courageously retraces her past to make sense of her father and herself. From the womens movement of the 60s and the back-to-the-land movement of the 70s to Cheringtons consulting work through three decades with powerful executives to her eventual decision to speak publicly in the formative months of #MeToo, Poetic License is one womans story of speaking truth in a world where, too often, men still call the shots.