Writing Fathers: Auto/biography and Unfulfilled Vocation in Sara Suleri Goodyear's Boys Will be Boys and Hanif Kureishi's My Ear at His Heart

Abstract

This paper analyzes Sara Suleri Goodyear's Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter's Elegy and Hanif Kureishi's My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father, in the context of current scholarship on relational auto/biography, specifically criticism on narratives of filiation, to explore the ways writers engage their fathers’ stories. The texts share certain characteristics: Both are written after the father's death by biracial English/Pakistani children who are themselves important writers; textual evidence attests to the authors’ awareness of a responsibility to complete their fathers’ unfulfilled dream of literary publication; the emphasis in each of the subtitles of the idea of filiation shows this relationship as the impulse behind the writing of the text. By engaging their fathers’ lives and their fathers’ texts in an auto/biographical project that completes the fathers’ dream of writing and being published, both writers signal their awareness of their moral obligation to do so precisely because it was their fathers who molded them into writers. We perceive a profound connection between the nature of the project, the specific form of the auto/biographical act, and the identity of the author as both child and writer.