By Connie Shoemaker, Co-Founder and Director Emerita, Spring International Language Center and Author. www.thegooddaughter.us/
Connie Shoemaker
A new memoir, The Good Daughter: Secrets, Life Stories, and Healing details a journey most of us will travel as care givers or recipients of that care. Author Connie Shoemaker is an only child responsible for a father with Alzheimer’s and a demanding mother who competes for attention. Add to this a low-budget nursing home with one decrepit elevator, a staff as international as the daughter’s foreign students, and residents that share their provocative questions with her.
The daughter reverts to her childhood pattern of trying to please her perfectionist, self-centered mom while at the same time struggling to maintain her own family life and meet the needs of the ESL school she directs. Life and death decisions are interspersed with moments of joy and laughter provided by her job, her family, and her father’s sparks of memory. When Mama shares secrets from the past, she opens the door to a better relationship through life-story telling. The result? This book, a closer relationship with her daughter and the daughter’s growing understanding of her own life.
“Also a poet, she [Shoemaker] crafts dialogue and situations to create scenes that can be funny, heartbreaking, or frightening…. An honest, painful yet humorous account of seeking unconditional love,” Kirkus Reviews.
Shoemaker lives in Littleton, CO and facilitates Life Story Telling for DU’s Osher Life Long Learning Institute (Olli).
Amity Bridge Books, 2015. Available through Amazon, Ingram Spark, and Tattered Cover.