My Three Fathers

A Memoir by Jamie Leigh Lorente

A memoir of reckoning, forgiveness, and the fragile work of choosing what to carry forward.

When the author travels to a marina in Washington to visit the father she barely knows, a 10-year journey begins. A Cuban exile who arrived in the United States alone as a child, he lives on an aging wooden yacht. She comes to know him through the stories he tells, the losses he carries, and the long shadow of a childhood cut short. Together, they return to Cuba to scatter his mother’s ashes, tracing a history shaped by displacement and unfinished grief.

With an adopted Cherokee-Jewish Army soldier father and an Iranian stepfather, the author grows up at the crossroads of war, migration, and cultural fracture. Each father offers a different version of love and absence, leaving marks she will spend years trying to understand. Their lives and their stories reveal the generational wounds she inherits and the complicated ways family is both formed and fractured.

She thinks about what caused her to marry so young and to the wrong man. As a mother of three sons, she is determined to give them what she never had: stability, presence, a sense of being rooted. Yet as she dismantles the mythologies she has long carried about her fathers, and about herself, she recognizes the patterns she has repeated.

A moving exploration of identity, inheritance, and belonging, this memoir asks whether we are bound by the stories we inherit—or whether we can choose the ones we pass on.

Thursday, October 8, 7PM | Third Place Books • Seattle, WA

BOOK LAUNCH: Jamie Lorente presents My Three Fathers at Third Place Books

This event is free and open to the public. For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain the author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!

Thursday, October 29, 7PM | Powell's City of Books • Portland, OR

Jamie Leigh Lorente in Conversation with Sonya Lea at Powell's Books in Portland, OR

Lorente will be joined in conversation by Sonya Lea, author of Wondering Who You Are.

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Publishing the Brilliant Work of Women Authors over 50

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