Local Author Shares Inspiration for Her Latest Work, ‘The Dead Dad Diaries’

Visit Erin-Slaughter.com for more information!

Local author, Erin Slaughter was in the studio to talk about her latest work, a memoir/creative nonfiction book, The Dead Dad Diaries, which was released in September.

Slaughter’s father was murdered by his newlywed wife the night before Erin‘s senior year of high school began. In the years following, her family was fractured by cancer, alcoholism, and estrangement, and Erin entered her coming-of-age attempting to leave the trauma of the murder in her past (except when she joked about it inappropriately to new friends and on first dates), while secretly navigating her own struggles with addiction and mental illness. As she sought to understand her father’s complicated past and how it led him to marry the woman who killed him, Erin became the collector of artifacts and retracer of family histories, redefining the “five stages of grief” for her own fragmented experience. Part true-crime story, part poetic meditation on seeking to know a parent posthumously, The Dead Dad Diaries confronts the impact of domestic violence and hereditary addiction on a family lineage, and questions the extent to which we can trust the stories we tell ourselves about our memories, our lives, and the people in them.

Erin is the author of the short story collection A Manual for How to Love Us (Harper Perennial, 2023), and two books of poetry: The Sorrow Festival (CLASH Books, 2022) and I Will Tell This Story to the Sun Until You Remember That You Are the Sun (New Rivers Press, 2019).

Her writing has appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Literature, CRAFT, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Originally from Texas, she holds an MFA from Western Kentucky University and a PhD from Florida State University. She is currently Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Coastal Carolina University. Find her online at Erin-Slaughter.com