DARE TO SAY IT: A Daughter's Story of Growing Up with a Gay Mother in 1970s America($16.99Value)

Description

Some childhoods are complicated. Others become history. Dare to Say It is the memoir of a girl growing up with a secret she didn’t ask for: her mother was gay. In the 1970s, that truth carried consequences — and it was far from the only one. At five, she was kidnapped from her California preschool and hidden across state lines. Throw in neglect, abandonment, betrayal, and a smorgasbord dishing out flavors of emotional, sexual, physical, and psychological abuse, and you’ve got a story. In an age when being gay could cost a parent their children, Tricia Giaimo tells what it was like to keep other people’s secrets — secrets she protected as if they were her own. While the adults around her fell apart, she held herself together. It’s a story of survival and the kind of resilience no child should need. Raw, unflinching, and unexpectedly funny, it’s the refusal to be broken by the astonishing choices other people made for her. For readers of raw memoirs about family secrets, complicated mothers, childhood trauma, LGBTQ history, abandonment, and survival without sentimentality, Dare to Say It is a true story told from the place history usually forgets: the child’s side. Tricia Giaimo is the author of Dare to Say It: A Daughter's Story of Growing Up with a Gay Mother in 1970s America.Her debut memoir tells the story of a child caught inside adult secrets, a 1970s custody conflict, parental kidnapping, abandonment, betrayal, and the kind of resilience no child should ever have to build. Giaimo writes with blunt honesty, dark humor, and a refusal to turn trauma into soft inspiration.Her work is not only about what happened to her. It is about how she learned to think through it. After surviving complex trauma, Giaimo developed a way of processing life that helped her separate truth from emotional noise, stop carrying what did not belong to her, and make decisions from clarity instead of confusion.She is also the founder of The Giaimo Code, a human intelligence framework offered through her website. Her work centers on clarity, accountability, pattern recognition, blind-spot detection, and decision-making from accurate information. She helps people and organizations strip away assumptions, identify hidden friction, and make decisions from reality instead of guesswork.