-- Austin, Texas, 25 January, 2021 – Plain View Press highlights All My Parents: Seeking a Sense of Self in Family, by Nancy Henderson-James, published July 15, 2020, as the author’s life-long journey exploring family traits and choices over many generations.
In All My Parents: Seeking a Sense of Self in Family, Nancy Henderson-James contemplates her ancestors and descendants and her relationship to family. She delves into the lives of parents and grandparents; exploring how their personality traits and passions affected her life. As the child of a missionary, often left in the care of others, she pieced together how to be a mother. Then she considers how her family and her husband’s family influenced their children and grand children. The arrival of grand children brought her life into balance, showing her the purpose of family: to nurture and love, to care for each tiny human who joins our lives, to appreciate each unique personality and experience the pure joy inherent in participating in family life.
From her grandparents, to her parents and surrogates, to her children and grandchildren, Henderson-James follows the family arc and discovers a way back to family integration. Copies of All My Parents (Plain View Press, July 15, 2020), paperback (ISBN: 978-1-63210-072-6) or ebook (ISBN: 978-1-63210-073-3), can be purchased through Amazon, retail bookstores, or ordered in quantity from Plain View Press.
Living her first two years in Washington state, Nancy Henderson-James spent the rest of her childhood years abroad in Portugal, Angola, and the former Southern Rhodesia. Often schooled away from her family, a variety of adults substituted as parent figures in her life, experiences which shaped her and her world view. Nancy graduated from Carleton College and received her library science degree at Pratt Institute. She worked as a high school librarian in Durham, North Carolina, where she has lived with her husband for 46 years. Nancy authored At Home Abroad: An American Girl in Africa (2010), which was honored with the Reviewers Choice Award by Reader Views.
All My Parents takes a deeper look into issues of attachment disruptions. For all who have lived globally mobile lives, or grown up in families whose parents are divorced, or worked with children of refugees, foster kids, or any other number of ways attachment patterns are interrupted, this is an important book. It reveals how such a story impacts the deepest places of a soul and family relationships. —Ruth E. Van Reken, co-author of Third Culture Kids: Growing Up Among Worlds and co-founder, Families in Global Transition
All My Parents is fueled with personal observations, pithy and lyrical writing. Nancy Henderson-James journeys back to examine the meaning of family roots and broken branches. Always clear-eyed, evaluative and honest, Henderson-James’s fresh, original story of a traveling childhood, opens her to a world of new languages, cultures, friends and caregivers but also disconnection in her closest relationships. —Faith Eidse, editor Unrooted Childhoods: Memoirs of Growing Up Global
All My Parents: Seeking a Sense of Self in Family offers a poignant account of Nancy Henderson-James’s formative years spent as the child of American missionaries in Africa. While enriched with travel and carefree days on the beaches of Angola, parental nurturing was often spare and supplanted with boarding schools and the care of surrogate parents. She draws from these often lonely experiences to describe how they impacted her life choices, family relationships and sense of self. She underscores the importance of parental presence but also how nonbiological parent figures can serve as anchoring and protective factors. —Anne Jones, PhD, LCSW, Retired Clinical Professor, School of Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with work focused on adult transitions and couple and family relationships
Publisher Plain View Press is a 45-year-old issue-based literary publishing house, a far-flung community of humane and highly creative writers, artists and activists, whose energies bring humanitarian enlightenment and hope to individuals and communities grappling with the issues of our time—peace, justice, the environment, education and gender.
Release ID: 88994471