When Did You Last See Your Father?

A year before my own father died, I had read Blake Morrison’s tragicomic memoir about his father. I had marked several passages but the page I had book-marked with a card from a London restaurant contained the following lines: “I’ve become a death bore. I embarrass people at dinner parties with my morbidity. I used to think the world divided between those who have children and those who don’t; now I think it divides between those who have lost a parent and those whose parents are still alive.”

That line haunts me even more powerfully now, and I cannot think… show more.

People have been writing about maddening dads for a long time (see Lear!), but in my own reading life, Blake Morrison’s charismatic, impossible father was the original. Poet Morrison wrote this unforgettable book at a time when memoirs were not the rage, and Morrison is English, so you know confessional revelations are not in his blood. 

I was then (and am still, basically) a fiction writer, so traveling with Morrison through vivid, funny childhood memories of his father, interspersed with poignant accounts of his father’s later illness and decline, was a great adventure, but not one I thought related to… show more.