Father and Son: A Lifetime

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The same year my father got sick I published a novel in which I killed him.

I’ve spent whole days, years, studying my father, and resentment has often worked its way into my writing. I’ve had my revenge. And yet, as Amos Oz writes in his memoir, “he who seeks the heart of the tale in the space between the work and its author is mistaken: the place to look is not the terrain between text and writer, but between text and reader…” Much of what I’ve written was prompted by my father, but I’ve never written about him. Those were other fathers, other people’s fathers.

Now I’m writing about him.

I set down these lines in a notebook in the fall of 2007, when, after months of doubt and of failing repeatedly to come up with any other ideas, I finally accepted that all I could write about was my father. I thought it was a good start, but that was as far as it went; I couldn’t continue. The same thing happened with all the other attempts I made in the following days to get past my block.

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