Relationships between any two people will have their up's and down's, but fathers and daughters almost always end up together in the end. In this new book, twenty four women open up to readers about the relationship they had with their dads. Some were work-a-holics, some absent for stretches of time, some had difficult problems to overcome. All remember fond memories and the lessons learned from the man who held their heart. Through the good and bad experiences, these women give readers a picture of love, perseverance, loyalty, and devotion.
What a book! No, not every father daughter relationship is perfect or even ends up well, but there are always lessons to be learned. This book will remind readers of that significant point. This is a book for anyone who wants to learn more about the father-daughter relationship and the impact it has on both lives. I received my review copy from Pr by the Book for participation in their blog tour. It is a great book!
Every Father's Daughter
Twenty-four Women Writers Remember Their Fathers
Selected and Presented by Margaret McMullan
With an Introduction by Phillip Lopate
302 pages, 6 x 9 hardcover
978-1-62054-013-8, $29.95
Publication date: April 9, 2015
“What is it about the relationship between fathers and daughters
that provokes so much exquisite tenderness, satisfying communion, longing for
more, idealization from both ends, followed often if not inevitably by
disappointment, hurt, and the need to understand and forgive, or to finger the
guilt of not understanding and loving enough?” writes Phillip Lopate, in his
introduction to Every Father's Daughter,a collection of 25 personal
essays by women writers writing about their fathers. The editor, Margaret McMullan,
is herself a distinguished novelist and educator. About half of these essays
were written by invitation for this anthology; others were selected by Ms.
McMullan and her associate, Philip Lopate, who provides an introduction. The
contributors include many well-known writers—Alice Munro, Jayne Anne Phillips,
Alexandra Styron, Ann Hood, Bobbie Ann Mason, Maxine Hong Kingston, among
others—as well as writers less well-known but no less cogent, inventive,
perceptive, lacerating, questioning, or loving of their fathers.
KIRKUS REVIEWS 1/18/2015:
A
collection of essays on the father-daughter dynamic. Editor and novelist
McMullan (Literature and Writing/Univ. of Evansville; Sources of Light,
2010, etc.) presents 24 ways of "knowing" one's father by accomplished,
independent daughters, each with a folksy introduction to help situate the
relationship in place and time. For many of these authors, the father was a
tall, handsome, impossibly romantic character in the family, removed from the
quotidian, often remote, and whose approval the daughters tried to maintain. In
a twist on this theme, Jane Smiley writes how ultimately relieved she was not
to know her father—who perhaps suffered from PTSD and divorced her mother when
the author was a toddler—because his absence allowed her the space to grow up
"free of preconceptions." Some of the contributors offer
reminiscences following their fathers' deaths—e.g., Jill McCorkle in "My
Dad." In "My Father's Daughter," Bliss Broyard fills in a deeper
portrait of her philandering, brilliant, bookish father by talking to his
lively, lifelong best friends in Greenwich Village, concluding ruefully that
she should have paid more attention to her father when he was alive. Melora
Wolff offers an excellent view of the glamorous world of visiting fathers from
the first-person, plural view of young ladies at New York City's Brearley
School, while Barbara Shoup describes her father's vanishing into alcoholism in
her excruciating essay "Waiting for My Father." Throughout, fathers
often represent the world of work, whether in the "special places"
like the gambling house that Maxine Hong Kingston describes in "The
American Father" or the sacred writing den that was strictly off limits to
boisterous children, as depicted in Alexandra Styron's "Reading My
Father." Other contributors include Jayne Anne Phillips, Antonya Nelson,
Ann Mason and Alice Munro, and Phillip Lopate provides the introduction.
Consistently elucidating portraits.
From the Foreword by Margaret McMullan
“After my father died, I couldn’t read or write, perhaps because,
in the end, my father was unable to read or write. I didn’t know it then, but I
was looking for a collection of intensely personal essays, written by great
women writers telling me about their fathers and how they came to know their
fathers, a collection which might help me make some kind of sense of my own
very close relationship with my father. I wanted to know from women,
replacement sisters, if they had similar relationships with their fathers as I
had with mine. Or, if their relationships were altogether different, I wanted
to know how exactly these relationships were different. I wanted to know if the
fact that my father was southern had anything to do with anything. I suppose,
more than anything, I just wanted to know that I wasn’t alone in my love, my
loss, my loneliness. I wanted to read this anthology, but it did not exist.
Writers write the book they want to read. Editors do the same. This book came
out of a need, my own, personal, selfish need.
“Eventually, I contacted the authors I loved and admired—some of
them friends, some of them friends of my father’s. I never wanted this to feel
like an assignment, but I suppose it was. I simply asked these women to tell me
about their fathers. They took it from there. For some authors, the idea of
writing about a father just clicked, and they wrote their essays, often within
days of the request. We all have stories about our fathers, even if it’s a bad
story or a non-story, it’s a story. If you write, you will read these essays
and feel the need to write your own.
“I kept my father’s tastes very much in mind during the difficult
but joyful process of selecting essays for this book. This collection reflects
my father, and, of course, other fathers as well. These essays are a sort of
collage or mosaic of fatherhood and all the ways daughters communicate or don’t
with their fathers. Of course, there’s a long list of wonderful women writers
not included here—this anthology really should extend itself into another
volume.”
Margaret McMullan is the author of six award-winning novels
including Aftermath Lounge, In My Mother’s House, Sources of Light, How
I Found the Strong, and When I Crossed No-Bob. Her stories
and essays have appeared in The Chicago Tribune, Ploughshares, Southern
Accents, TriQuarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Sun, among
several other journals and anthologies. She has received an NEA Fellowship in
literature and a Fulbright award to teach at the University of Pécs in Pécs,
Hungary. She currently holds the Melvin M. Peterson Endowed Chair in Literature
and Writing at the University of Evansville in Evansville, Indiana.
About the author: