"This raw, unflinching memoir is a love letter to the author's fractured family and to her devastated (and devastating) teenage self. The Dead Dad Diaries is a remarkable collage of surviving unimaginable loss and heartbreak."

-Betsy Bonner, author of The Book of Atlantis Black

"The Dead Dad Diaries is one of the most powerful and moving memoirs I've ever read. In gorgeous, devastating, and inventive prose, Slaughter deconstructs and rewrites traditional narratives about grief, family, and identity. Here, grief doesn't come and go in stages; grief becomes part of Slaughter's identity, shaping who she is, who she becomes, and who and what she lets into her life. The Dead Dad Diaries is a powerful examination of how family both heals and harms us, how we are all our own people and, at the same time, shaped by our pasts and the people who populated them-and by their pasts, too. This is a book that will take you apart and put you back together as a new person, smarter, more whole, and with a deeper understanding of how we become who we are. I'm in awe of what Erin Slaughter achieves in these pages."

-Emma Bolden, author of The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis

"Grief is not a linear process-it slinks and slithers its way through what is left behind. Some days it hangs heavy like Alabama humidity a few hours before the sky opens up. In The Dead Dad Diaries, Erin Slaughter collages the loss of her father, as she says, 'archiving our parents' fears and mistakes'-a careful unearthing of the fossils of a beast that she simultaneously knew intimately, but not constantly. Slaughter graciously allows us to witness this excavation in all of its forms, allowing the reader to take comfort and solace in the shapes we recognize."

-Brian Oliu, author of Body Drop: Notes on Fandom and Pain in Professional Wrestling