A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of 2015
“Extraordinary… utterly impossible to put down.”
— The New York Times
“One of the great father-daughter books of our time.”
—Pat Conroy
“Fascinating…cinematic…poignant…”
—The Washington Post
“Extraordinary… utterly impossible to put down.”
— The New York Times
“One of the great father-daughter books of our time.”
—Pat Conroy
“Fascinating…cinematic…poignant…”
—The Washington Post
It was the spring of 1994 when I returned from work to find the package containing my father’s manuscript on my doorstep. I was fifty-six years old and I’d been waiting for some word of him for most of my life.
I was a six year-old child when he stopped coming home. My mother refused to say where he had gone, except to tell me that he was “ill” and “away.” That same year of 1944, she filed for a divorce and quickly remarried, closing the chapter of her life that included my father. I was never taken to visit him growing up; his name was rarely mentioned in our house. Since childhood, I had been informed in fleeting comments that he suffered from manic depression. I had seen him again only once, very briefly, before his death in 1959.