Daddy Issues: Inserts from the Diary of a Broken Woman

DADDY ISSUES: Inserts from the Diary of a Broken Woman is a body laid on the table and a heart open.

These poems move through abandonment, jealousy, infidelity, shame, loneliness, numb survival, rage, and finally something like mercy. A daughter speaks to the father who walked away. A woman explains how that absence trained her to beg men to stay. A wife confesses the ways she crossed the line. A mother says, without apology, that the "strong Black woman" costume is killing her.

Nothing here is romanticized. The voice is unfiltered, intimate, and grown: "I needed 'hey princess.' I needed steady hands." The book holds the ache of watching a father give his love to another child, the kind of humiliation that breeds a lifetime of "please don't leave." It sits in the aftermath of being touched, lied to, cheated on, recorded, accused, and used as proof for laughs.

It wrestles with the way soft turns into armor just to make it through the day. But this is not just trauma tourism. This is record-keeping.

Across these pages, a woman names her damage, defends her tenderness, and refuses to carry everybody else's expectations. She speaks to the men in her life, to partners, to the court of public opinion, and to God. She admits the mess and still claims her beauty, her motherhood, her right to rest, her right to softness, her right to be seen without being told to "be strong."

Lena Larice is a mother, a storyteller, and a survivor of emotional abandonment who writes in a voice that sounds like the kitchen table at 2 a.m. Her work speaks to women who were forced to be "grown" before they were allowed to be held. She writes about father-wounds, shame, infidelity, motherhood, Black woman exhaustion, and the right to softness without apology.

DADDY ISSUES: Inserts from the Diary of a Broken Woman is her debut poetry collection.