Ungrieving: A Memoir of Emotional Abuse, Loss, and Relief

by Jennifer Flatt

In Ungrieving, a memoir about family dysfunction and estrangement, religious doubt, and complex relationships, Jennifer Stolpa Flatt provides others with the book she needed but couldn’t find. The insights will resonate with those who have experienced family divisions or who support those who do, and those who struggle to let go of the relationships they wanted but never had.

After a lifetime of emotional abuse, verbal attacks, and controlling behaviors, including a four-year estrangement from a man she called “Daddy,” despite not feeling the warmth the nickname implies, her father’s death left her struggling to make sense of their fractured relationship.

She felt both a sense of relief and a profound

I don’t miss him and I feel guilty admitting that.
Sometimes I do miss him. And that confuses me.

Through relatable and compelling stories and essays, Flatt places readers in key moments throughout her family’s journey, demonstrating how she, her sister, and her mom suffered as collateral damage due to her dad’s untreated depression. The memoir artfully weaves in passages from her dad’s journals, allowing her to explore his pain, his dreams, and his parenting choices.

Flatt also explores how Catholicism, changing her religious faith, music, mental illness, counseling, and feminism both united and separated her from her father.

Ungrieving challenges readers to think carefully about what we say to ourselves and what we say to others in moments of grief. Flatt’s journey also helps ease the guilt readers might feel around strained relationships, questioning religion, or mental health concerns as readers learn to see themselves and others as individuals, and not only in relationship to others.

Genres: Memoir

293 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 15, 2024

About the author

Jennifer Stolpa Flatt is an educator, writer, and musician. Her lifelong love of literature, words, and language allowed her to escape and eventually begin to process the challenges of her childhood with a verbally abusive father. She and her dad shared a passion for faith, feminism, and music; they also shared bouts of depression, bursts of self-loathing, and struggles with insecurities. When he died, she searched for a book to help her process the loss that somehow also felt like emotional and spiritual release. Finding no such book, she took her experience as a writer and teacher and began to write her way out of this strange state of ungrief.

Jennifer has decades of experience as a church musician, singing and playing organ, piano, and trumpet. Although baptized and confirmed as a Catholic, Jennifer has been a practicing member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America (ELCA) since 2004. Her exploration of faith began in childhood, deepened through her PhD dissertation on Victorian women novelists and their depictions of women ministers, and continues as she considers her own faith future.

Currently serving as the vice president of student services for a technical college in Wisconsin, Jennifer is also a reader, baseball fan, and mom to two boys–Anton and Edward. She lives in Marinette, Wisconsin, with her husband, Jason, in the Victorian home they are restoring.

Reviews

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ungrieving is a memoir as much as a journey to healing. Told early on in past and present events that set off her father’s instability during the author’s childhood and post-funeral reminiscences as an adult, Jennifer Flatt tells her story of growing up in an abusive environment. I lost my father a couple of years ago and can’t help comparing my own journey through emotional abuse, loss, and relief, although maybe not exactly in that order. You put yourself in a peculiarly vulnerable position when you share memories, your truth as you know it. Flatt’s relationship with her sister Karen and friends who support her story make her story relevant. Flatt shares that her father had mental health issues that were mostly untreated. Her childhood memories of Dad and Mom fighting in front of and sometimes with the kids are carefully couched within her belief that he wanted to protect and nurture his children and family but couldn’t separate his inner child. Later in his adult life he did try therapy and medication, but it didn’t last. He couldn’t move past his personal feeling and accused others of being considering him a failure, or “dumb”; words he might have had ingrained from a childhood he never chose to share.

Jennifer and Karen grew up trying to keep peace at all costs. Particularly memorable for me is an afternoon when Jennifer is eight years old and Dad insists on having family game afternoon…but with games that are long and difficult to play in which he tends to defeat everyone. When the girls would rather play after one such game, Dad melts down with grievances about everything. While Mom and Karen take turns standing up to him and apologizing and attempting to appease, the whole thing ends in all the girls crying and Dad demanding a group hug stating that the family who fights together makes them stronger and more blessed. It’s hard not to be horrified. On the flipside Flatt shares many moments of empathy when Dad practiced as a lay minister and supported Flatt’s questioning church doctrine. She is able to express resentment when others knew her dad as a helpful and positive influence, without being aware of his damaging side. She realizes his problems were only one aspect of his personality and recognizes her father was in between a hero and a villain.

“One of my talents is post-conversational paranoia,” she says. As a child she developed fears of encroaching on her father’s space, fear of revealing a medical condition due to financial issues, fear for her mother’s health, fear of the future, struggling to be a better person, falling into the darkness of the soul. A diagnosis of clinical depression and treatment made a difference but it took decades. Flatt entertained wishes her mom would have taken the girls and left. Later, her mother admits the same, though the marriage was not a total failure or complete nightmare. The passing of Flatt’s father to cancer also sparked an interest in getting to know her mother in a different way.

Ungrieving is a great, helpful memoir especially for those who need to work through the trauma of being parented by people who tried, couldn’t help themselves, didn’t know better, were damaged themselves, and loved us even while hurting us. When Flatt finds her father’s words of relief at his own father’s death, she says, “I can’t help but think how alike we are, how similar our paths. I understand this ungrieving of a parent. He understands mine for him. My inheritance includes this understanding of grief that isn’t.” And it’s okay. Highly recommended.

[C Foerster · Rating 5 out of 5]

I chose this book because my own life has been fraught with abuse so I am always interested in other peoples perspectives. At first I was disappointed in what she considered abuse,seemingly mild to me and part of daily living. As I got further into the book I realized that part of the power these people have is that children,having no other experience,see things as normal with the abuse and they think they are the cause of the abuse and deserve what they got. Exactly the way I felt until I was fortunate enough,as an adult,to seek very good help. It still took a long time for me to realize the abuse and start to heal. Today I live a happy and fulfilling life but every now and again I am invaded by guilt that I cut them out of my life in order to survive but now have the tools to turn that around. The author helped me to realize that her abuse was just as valid and destructive as my own and the guilt we momentarily struggle with is normal. A very good and thoughtful read.

[Elyzabeth Hoffman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve been thinking about how to review this book since starting it. Initially, I was drawn to the narrative; the past and present chapters complementing each other as the reader transverses the pages from childhood to adulthood and the in-between. The reflection from the author was no doubt a healing experience, and it was enlightening to put oneself in her shoes and imagine the circumstances.
I expected a well-written and heartfelt memoir, but I didn’t expect to connect so readily to the transformation and process that is “Ungrieving”

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

A well-paced, heartbreaking, reflective timeline of one of the worst realizations a child can come to. While it can be a difficult read, it nevertheless had me thinking about the relationships in my own life that have had emotionally abusive elements, and realizing why I still dwell on them from time to time.

There are pieces in this story that I would have liked to know more about - in particular, I would have liked to hear more of Jennifer Flatt's sister's point of view regarding estrangement and re-connection - but the book remains powerful in the moments where it chooses to linger.

[Traceylee · Rating 2 out of 5]

Why

I thought it would be a better story about a narrsinist parent. I didn't care for the book but gave it a try to read.