If I write here about the books I’m preparing, I eventually shame myself into writing them, so here we go. I had been reading for a while for a book on secondary characters in the European novel when it struck me that the committee judging the research exercises (or ‘sexenios’) might consider it Comparative Literature rather than English Studies. That might not be the case, but I’ve put it aside for the time being. Other interests have led me to explore instead memoirs by sons about their fathers (what Thomas Couser called patriography, including also daughters) and this is the topic of my next book. I’d like to comment today specifically on the difficulties of choosing a corpus, as I’m finishing that process.

          I wrote my ‘tesina de doctorado’ (the equivalent of a long MA dissertation) about one film adaptation, exhaustively comparing the novel, the screenplay and the film. I could have added half a dozen more adaptations and this would have resulted in a PhD dissertation. However, I decided to explore all the adaptations of Frankenstein, and finally convinced myself that I actually wanted to write about the representation of monstrosity, following a Cultural Studies methodology. Since neither of my two supervisors stopped me, my corpus grew to 75 novels and 150 films. Why so many? Mainly because that’s what I found in the works on genre fiction that I read. I feared that I could say nothing minimally coherent without exploring a vast corpus, which also delayed the process of writing. It was also great fun to read novels and watch films with monsters!

          This obstinate encyclopaedic approach almost kills my capacity to write books. I spent a decade, while I wrote articles and chapters in collective books, wondering how to approach the figure of the villain for a book. I had the longest imaginable list of all kinds of fictions. In despair, I asked my former PhD supervisor, Andrew Monnickendam, for help, and he suggested that I focused on what was less explored. This was post-WWII British fiction and that is the direction that my book took. The corpus selection was quite easy, but since some of the nine chapters dealt with trilogies and series, I ended up writing about forty novels.

          That was also, more or less, the number of documentaries I covered in my following book, after another long list (from checking the Oscars and the Sundance awards), and watching about 100 films. At least, films are not as time-consuming as novels! For my book on men and science fiction, my list of authors and novels extended to about 200 volumes. Reading Wikipedia pages and reviews, I whittled it down to the 17 authors and 50 novels I finally covered, in 15 chapters. Again, you might think this is crazy, but I was dealing with the whole field of male-authored 21st century SF, and from that point of view my corpus is tiny. Also, I loved (almost) all the novels I worked on!

          The biggest conundrum in that book was how to choose a representative corpus, without the presence of certain writers feeling tokenistic. I have the same problem again. My predecessor in this type of study, Stephen Mansfield, examined in his monograph Australian Patriography: How Sons Write Fathers in Contemporary Life Writing (2014), a book apparently based on his PhD dissertation, just seven works by men born in the post-WWII period: Richard Freadman’s Shadow of Doubt (2003), Raimond Gaita’s Romulus, My Father (1998), Robert Gray’s The Land I Came Through Last (2008), John Hughes’s The Idea of Home (2004), and Peter Rose’s Rose Boys (2001). They are well-chosen examples, ‘most of which,’ he explains, ‘have had a significant popularity and/or impact over the last fifteen years.’ This seems reasonable for one nation and one decade (1998-2008) but I have much more ground to cover. I have considered focusing only on the UK, as I did for the villains, since US patriography is generally better known, but I got curious about Ireland, Canada and even New Zealand (and Palestine!), without totally dismissing Australia, and now I have the problem of how to narrow down my sprawling corpus and justify it.

          Add to this that one thing is selecting a corpus, and another doing the homework so that reviewers don’t call you illiterate. The word count for an academic book is 80000-120000 words, most commonly 100000, and I find that it cannot be split into more than 15 chapters. That is an inescapable fact. Yet, the list of pre-21st century and 21st-century memoirs I’ve put together runs to about 60 books. Some I have started and abandoned, seeing they were not leading in an interesting direction. Others I read a long time ago, and must now re-read. Some I’ve read with great expectations only to be disappointed. I’ve left some that I’ve loved, but can’t compete with other more prominent titles, for a couple of separate articles.

          I want to share all those books with you, so I’ll begin with the list of the pre-21st century volumes, the beginnings of English-language patriography. It is often argued that modern patriography begins with Edmund Gosse’s account of his teen rebellion in Father and Son (1907), but I set the origins in J.S. Mill’s Autobiography (1873). I have no room to comment here on each books, so please, trust me when I say that those two and the following are all great books:

  • 1967 JR Ackerley, My Father and Myself (UK)
  • 1968 Frank O’Connor, My Father’s Son (IR)
  • 1969 Thomas Blackburn, A Clip of Steel (UK)
  • 1979 Geoffrey Wolff, The Duke of Deception (USA)
  • 1982 Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude (USA)
  • 1986 Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History (USA)
  • 1989 Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life (US); yes, this is Geoffrey Wolff’s brother
  • 1991 Philip Roth, Patrimony: A True Story (USA)
  • 1993 Blake Morrison, And When Did You Last See Your Father? (UK)
  • 1993 Farley Mowat, My Father’s Son (CAN)
  • 1994 Clark Blaise, I Had A Father: A Post-modern Autobiography (US/CAN)
  • 1995 Stephen Humphrey Bogart (& Gary Provost), Bogart: In Search of My Father (USA)
  • 1995 Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (USA)
  • 1996 Calvin Trillin, Messages from My Father: A Memoir (USA)
  • 1998 Christopher Dickey, Summer of Deliverance : A Memoir of Father and Son (USA)

If you had to choose just one, please read Calvin Trillin’s slim volume, no doubt one of the most beautiful books ever written by a son about his father. This generous Ukrainian-born man, was a migrant who knew that he would not succeed as a man in the USA but that his son might, and so he did all he could to help him.

          Now the 21st century volumes. Very conveniently, my book was to begin with a chapter on Martin Amis’s Experience (2000), but I just can’t write well about works I don’t like much and, although I must deal with Amis, there will be no chapter on him. I’m not saying yet which ones I have chosen for the book, only that 5 are British, 5 US and the other 5 Canadian, Irish, Australian and from New Zealand (or Palestine?). All had been published before I started reading for my book, but I knew my selection could not be complete without Tom Junod’s memoir, published a few months ago, and I was right. I learned about Junod when writing my book chapter on Fred Rogers, and I’ve been waiting for his book since then. It was worth the wait. Here’s the list (I have crossed out the year of the books I won’t be dealing with, not because they are flawed in any way but because they don’t fit my projected book):

  • 2000 Martin Amis, Experience (UK)
  • 2000 Carlo Gébler, Father & I: A Memoir (IR); by Edna O’Brien’s son
  • 2004 Alexander Waugh, Fathers and Sons: The Autobiography of a Family (UK); by Evelyn Waugh’s grandson
  • 2004 Hanif Kureishi, My Ear at His Heart (UK)
  • 2004 Tim Russert, Big Russ & Me: Father and Son: Lessons of Life (USA)
  • 2005 William Childress, An Ozark Odyssey: The Journey of a Father and Son (USA)
  • 2005 Gary Imlach, My Father and Other Working-Class Football Heroes (UK)
  • 2005 JR Moehringer, The Tender Bar (USA)
  • 2006 Christopher Lemmon, A Twist of Lemmon: A Tribute to My Father (USA)
  • 2007 Mark Kurzem, The Mascot: Unraveling the Mystery of My Jewish Father’s Nazi Boyhood (AUS)
  • 2008 Ariel Sabar, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq (USA)
  • 2008 Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Beautiful Struggle: A Memoir (USA)
  • 2008 Augusten Burroughs, A Wolf at the Table (USA)
  • 2008 Sathnam Sanghera, The Boy with the Topknot: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton (UK)
  • 2008 Andrew X Pham, The Eaves of Heaven: A Life in Three Wars (USA-VIETNAM)
  • 2009 Dan Hill, I Am My Father’s Son (CAN)
  • 2010 Michael Frayn, My Father’s Fortune (UK)
  • 2010 Luke Jennings, Blood Knots: Of Fathers, Friendship and Fishing (UK)
  • 2011 John Darnton, Almost a Family: A Memoir (USA)
  • 2011 JJ Lee, The Measure of a Man: The Story of a Father, a Son, and a Suit (CAN)
  • 2013 Pat Conroy, The Death of Santini: The Story of a Father and His Son (USA)
  • 2013 Michael Hainey, After Visiting Friends: A Son’s Story (USA)
  • 2014 Alan Cumming, Not My Father’s Son: A Memoir (UK)
  • 2015 Jonathan Kozol, The Theft of Memory: Losing My father, One Day at a Time (USA)
  • 2016 Adam Dudding, My Father’s Island: A Memoir (NZ)
  • 2016 Ralph Webster, A Smile in One Eye: a Tear in the Other (USA)
  • 2016 Chris Offutt, My Father, the Pornographer (USA)
  • 2016 Hisham Matar, The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between (USA-Libyan)
  • 2016 Juan F. Thompson, Stories I Tell Myself: Growing Up with Hunter S. Thompson (USA)
  • 2017 Thomas G. Couser, Letter to My Father: A Memoir (USA)
  • 2017 Daniel Mendelsohn, An Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic (USA)
  • 2017 Sam Miller, Fathers (UK)
  • 2018 Larry Elder, Dear Father, Dear Son / A Lot Like Me: A Father and Son’s Journey to Reconciliation (USA)
  • 2018 David Giffels, Furnishing Eternity: A Father, a Son, a Coffin, and a Measure of Life (USA)
  • 2019 Brian Harvey, Sea Trial: Sailing After My Father (CAN)
  • 2019 David Crow, The Pale-Faced Lie: A True Story (USA)
  • 2019 David Slucki, Sing This at My Funeral: A Memoir of Fathers and Sons (USA)
  • 2020 Charlie Gilmour, Featherhood: A Memoir of Two Fathers and a Magpie (UK)
  • 2022 Rajah Shehade, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir (PAL)
  • 2022 Nabil Ayers, My Life in the Sunshine: Searching for My Father and Discovering My Family (USA)
  • 2023 Richard Flannagan, Question 7 (AUS)
  • 2023 Jonathan Raban, Father and Son: A Memoir (UK)
  • 2026 Tom Junod, In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to Be a Man: A Memoir (USA)

If you want to read just one, my recommendation is Charlie Gilmour’s beautifully written Featherhood. If you’re a Pink Floyd fan, you’ll be pleased to know that Charlie’s loving stepfather is David Gilmour.

          An extensive reading list demands investing money, which comes from my pocket. Although my Departament can buy some books for me, they are the property of the library, and I can’t deface them with my notes. The Ministry, as far as I know, helps research groups to pay for trips to conferences, but not for books. So, I have bought many of the books second-hand, and employed, as you may imagine, other resources. Writing books is, in the end, an expensive hobby and sales of the published volumes are so low that royalties do not cover the cost. That’s a matter for another post.

          By the way, I forgot to announce my thesis. This is that patriography by sons reflects like no other literary or audiovisual genre the process by which masculinity changes from one generation to another: what is appreciated, what is just tolerated, what is rejected. That’s why I’m reading all those many books, and learning plenty! I’ll keep you posted.