Paper Orphans: Writers' Children Write their Lives

Abstract

Of the many memoirs of parents published in North America since the early 1990s, the great majority concern fathers rather than mothers. This pattern reflects the relational dynamics of the post-war middle-class nuclear family, typified by an absent bread-earning father and an available home-making mother. Memoirs of fathers (patriographies) tend to emerge from relationships that were experienced (by the writers) as deficient in some way or other. The books are best read not as static representations of fathers (i.e., biographies), whether favourable or not, but rather as attempts to claim or even fashion a relationship with a father who is absent—because of death, geographical distance, or emotional reserve. A significant number have to do with fathers who were creative intellectuals—writers, artists, and so on. In such cases, the child often has a fraught relationship to the father's body of work. For one thing, the father's creative work is what removes him from the house or sequesters him within it. Moreover, insofar as the father's intellectual labour produces a species of progeny, it may provoke a kind of virtual sibling rivalry. Furthermore, the work is generally available to a wider public, with whom the child may feel competitive. The writing of the memoir often attempts to renegotiate the parent-child relationship, in part by establishing a new relationship to the father's body of work.