The best memoirs on missing a father’s love

Lisa Brennan-Jobs is the daughter of Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, and one of the wealthiest men in the world. This didn’t make him an attentive, loving father. Lisa was regularly ignored, and deliberately left out of his new family (he never married her mother). Her determination to win his love failed, and she blamed herself for his lack of acceptance. She longed for reassurance that never materialized. Lisa had to face the unwanted reality: “He doesn’t love me.” When Jobs was dying from pancreatic cancer, with tears, he owned that none of this was her fault. In spite of the sadness of her story, she didn’t allow his rejection and late confession to consume her with bitterness. She writes honestly and kindly about growing up with a famous father. For those of us who have searched and never gained our father’s love or acceptance, this story reminds us that such losses cross all economic boundaries and occur in all kinds of families.

I had no idea that a Cuban boy recalling his childhood could so drown me in a family and culture worlds apart from my own. Waiting for Snow evoked laughter, astonishment, and tears. The father in this story, like my own in some ways, replaced his son with another boy not even his own. Eire’s attempts to reconcile with his father never worked. I took heart from his experience. It was similar to my own attempts to cross the ravine and reach my stepfather’s love. Eire’s hilarity, sharp intellect, and ability to write the most eloquent cursing I’ve ever read kept me reading this book by a man who is now a professor of theology at Yale.

I look for literature that is beautifully and powerfully written, carrying universal experiences most can relate to. Even when the circumstances are different from my own, a story can grip my heart because I recognize bits of myself in it. Educated is the story of a girl deeply embedded in her parents’ religious community but completely isolated from school, friends, and culture outside that sectarian divide. Westover’s father reigned as a tyrant over the entire family. Any violation of his rules was met with punishment and deprivation. That control had devastating consequences for Westover and her relationship with her father. She eventually escaped the prison-like atmosphere, earned a PhD in history, and gained a life of her own. She writes with compelling insight, kindness, and an amazing lack of bitterness, something I aspire for myself. 

It was the title that first attracted me. How can this be so? Nayeri’s 12-year-old self proves the truth of his title as he narrates his story, first as a coddled little prince in Iran, then as a refugee as his mother fled death threats because of her conversion to Christianity. His father stayed behind in Iran and was seldom heard from. He became the father who rarely engaged with or demonstrated love for his son. After surviving refugee camps, Nayeri, his mother and sister finally arrived as immigrants to a small white community in Oklahoma where they struggled to survive. Nayeri’s writing style is incomparably unique. It’s the brain of a teenage boy burning as he processes crazy events no child should have to live through. I was captivated by his invincible spirit and marvelous sense of humor.

Most people, I think, obsess over the desire to please their parents. Too often, it simply isn’t possible to gain their approval or their love, however hard we try. It was like this with my stepfather. Although Traveling Mercies is a rich, multi-themed book, what pulled me in was her relationship to her parents, particularly her father. Lamott tries to convince herself that her family could survive their alcoholism and infidelities. She writes of longing for her family to be “…OK and that we were safe, and that my daddy wasn’t going to leave us, and that one day I would be loved.” Similarly, my greatest fear was that my mother would die, leaving me with no parent at all. Hearing others’ stories is a comfort knowing we are not alone in our anxieties.