Dear Lilly by Peter Greyson

It is a father's letter to his daughter. It is a guidebook for navigating the treacherous waters of adolescence. It is filled with love, inspiration and an inside look into what boys really think and how a young girl can protect herself, and her heart, from thoughtless people and a harsh world.


How would your life be different if you were given a handbook to help you navigate all of the unforeseen obstacles? What if this handbook was written by your father? This is what Peter Greyson started creating when his daughter, Lilly, was just three years old. In DEAR LILLY (iUniverse, June 2009), Greyson has written an outline of all the mistakes he made and the lessons he learned. Dear Lilly is an enlightening book filled with personal anecdotes, insightful tips and hard-earned wisdom from a father who had been there, done that and was, quite literally, living to tell the story.

Peter Greyson, a former abused child, drug addict, womanizing frat boy, and suicidal depressive, has written an emotionally stirring account of a young man’s battle with his own crippling inner demons and his eventual path toward enlightenment. Greyson calls upon his wisdom as both father and school teacher, to gently lead teenage girls through a treacherous maze of truth, deception and adolescent uncertainty. With a literary style that is in parts both youthfully enthusiastic and seriously insightful, Greyson writes a survival guide that offers the brutally honest male perspective for young women seeking answers to life’s deepest questions.

Topics include:

• § Boys: Why They Lie. How to Handle Them.
• § Teenage Angst: Everybody Hurts. Depression.
• § Abuse: How to Prevent it From Happening. How to Survive It.
• § High School exposed.
• § Tales from a Recovering Drug Addict.
• § Death.
• § The Three Keys to Happiness.

Some of the advice he imparts reflects his own artistic preferences: “Since primitive man first banged on a hollow log with a rock, enjoyed the reverberation it made, and repeated the process, people have been producing the most mind-blowing creations ever assembled.” He then proceeds to list the absolutely necessary albums and songs for a proper musical education (apart from the classics) from the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Bob Marley, B.B. King, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Stevie Wonder, Led Zepplin, and BlackSabbath (the song is “War Pigs” from the album “Paranoid”).

He concludes the book with a poem,”Promise Yourself,” by Christian Larson, written in 1912, which had a profound influence on turning his life around. The last stanza reads:

(Promise yourself…)
To be too large for worry, too noble for anger,
Too strong for fear, and too happy to permit the presence of trouble”

Disclosure - This product was received for review consideration.
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