Gretchen Eberhart grew up in a household that—thanks to her father—was populated by the most revered poets and writers of the twentieth century, from Robert Frost to James Dickey, a powerful swirl that largely was a men's club. Eschewing that world, Cherington spent her thirty-five year career advising top executives in how to change their companies and themselves.

 

But at age forty, with two growing children and her consulting work in its early years, she faced a deeply personal dilemma: to protect her parents’ well-crafted myths while silencing her voice, or to challenge those myths and find her truth—even the unbearable truth that her generous and kind father had sexually violated her.  

 

Aided by her father’s extensive literary archives at Dartmouth College and by conversations with some of his best writing friends, Cherington makes sense of her father and herself. From the women’s movement of the ’60s and the back-to-the-land movement of the ’70s, to Cherington’s consulting work, to speaking publicly in the formative months of #MeToo, Poetic License is one woman’s story of speaking truth in a world where men still too often called the shots.