Dale Engelson Sessa

         AND ALL THE QUEEN’S MEN is a frank, poignant reading experience, an ambitious memoir that explores the psychological profile of a woman throughout her life with husbands, boyfriends and acquaintances. It is a story of promiscuity and forgiveness, of the secrets she keeps and the situations in which she finds herself over the course of five decades. Sessa speaks to the hearts and lives of women of all ages in conflict with a controlling father. She puts a face to women in relationships that have become scarred by sexual domination or verbal abuse or to those smothered by a soundless partner who refuses to communicate, all of which she has experienced and chosen to share in her debut book. For this author, there has always been the muddling chasm between anticipation and reality in all of her relationships. She falls in love serially with the prospect of a man rather than with the man himself, holding on for long stretches of time waiting for these men to fulfill her expectations. However, each liaison is more complicated than the one that came before. As the author writes, “every step forward begins with a foot firmly planted in the past.” She returns to her roots to investigate what went so terribly wrong.

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