So those fears, whatever they were, have an entirely different relevance now, and I’ll never know exactly what that relevance is. Then, in one of the great hairpin ironies of both his life and mine, he died three days after publication. He warmed to the idea of being a character in a book that would be read by strangers and (worse) people who’d known him for most of his 85 years. His response was as simple as it was complex, and it would evolve over the months leading up to publication. When I finally did give him a manuscript, he spent a few days with it, then returned it to me, stating flatly, “All my worst fears are confirmed.” That was it. He knew I was home for long hours behind a closed door, hunched over a keyboard, trying to get the corners square. He knew I was making notes as we hung out in his workshop, writing down things he’d said, taking photographs, asking questions about the arcane details of woodworking and many other things (including the Playboy bunny he’d once dated), a necessarily obtrusive process of real-time research that I tried to make as natural as possible. In my own case, my dad kept asking through the four years of my writing, “When am I going to get to see this?” He had some idea of what was in store, as I was chronicling the process of our building a casket together, which would eventually result in the memoir Furnishing Eternity: A Father, a Son, a Coffin, and a Measure of Life, published at the beginning of this year. I doubt many of us who have written a nonfiction book with our father as a main character have thought, “I can’t wait till he reads this!” Plenty have waited intentionally until after the old man’s passing to put the story onto the page. The problem with writing a book about one’s father is that he’s either going to read it, or choose not to, or else he has died and will never have the option.Įach of these scenarios is fraught with its own quicksand pits of apprehension, second guessing, and potential regret.
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