Why am I passionate about this?
When the pandemic arrived, I feared that my father, who was then in his late eighties, would certainly die from the coronavirus. What made my anxiety more terrible, I think, was that I was at work on a novel where the father was dying. Then, the vaccine became available, and I was relieved when, living thousands of miles away from my father, I heard the news that my father had been vaccinated. The father in my novel wasnât so lucky. While my father lived, I began reading what other writers had written about their fathers, particularly their deaths. Iâm listing below a few of my favorites.
Amitava's book list on fathers
Why did Amitava love this book?
A year before my own father died, I had read Blake Morrisonâs 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: âIâve 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 donât; now I think it divides between those who have lost a parent and those whose parents are still alive.â
That line haunts me even more powerfully now, and I cannot think of a more true line.
2 authors picked When Did You Last See Your Father? as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
The critically-acclaimed memoir and the basis for the 2007 motion picture, directed by Anand Tucker and starring Colin Firth and Jim Broadbent
And when did you last see your father? Was it last weekend or last Christmas? Was it before or after he exhaled his last breath? And was it him really, or was it a version of him, shaped by your own expectations and disappointments?
Blake Morrison's subject is universal: the life and death of a parent, a father at once beloved and exasperating, charming and infuriating, domineering and terribly vulnerable. In reading about Dr. Arthur Morrison, we comeâŠ