Pamela Gay's I'm So Glad You're Here is a riveting flash memoir that begins with Gay, at age 18, witnessing her father being bound in a straightjacket and carried out on a stretcher to a state mental hospital. While Gay tries to move on with her life, her trauma escalates as her family struggles with the ramifications of her father’s deterioration and death, facing obstacles like divorce, abandonment, addiction, caring for aging parents, suicide, and healing through therapy. And with May being Mental Health Awareness month and so many conquering their own mental health battles at this time, this book is becoming more timely.
Pamela Gay is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) award in creative nonfiction and an Independent eBook Award for her memoir Homecoming, which combined text, image, and sound. An installation based on this memoir and sponsored by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) included artifacts. Gay’s writing has been published in Brevity, Iowa Review, Paterson Literary Review, Midway Journal, Monkeybicycle, Grey Sparrow, Vestal Review, and other literary journals, as well as two anthologies. Gay is a professor emerita at Binghamton University, State University of New York, where she taught courses in flash memoir and flash fiction. She lives in Upstate New York