My Three Fathers: A Memoir

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. 

Jamie Leigh Lorente is a Cuban-American writer, veteran, and advocate. She writes to reclaim the body and reframe the narrative of survival. Her work appears in My Teeth Don’t Chew on Shrapnel, NAILED Magazine, and Poetic Prosthesis: Trauma and Language in Contemporary Veterans’ Writing (Edinburgh University Press, 2022). She teaches writing at San Francisco Film School and facilitates veteran writing workshops in Portland. Her short documentary film My Body Is explores the healing power of poetry.