Publication date:
09 August 2017Length of book:
222 pagesPublisher
Hamilton BooksDimensions:
228x151mm6x9"
ISBN-13: 9780761869580
Having wounded his father with a hurtful letter when he was twenty-three, Tom Couser felt somewhat responsible for his later mental collapse. When his father died, Tom found personal documents that revealed facets of his father’s life of which Tom had known nothing. Too traumatized to grieve properly, much less to probe his father’s complicated history, Tom boxed the documents and stored them—for over thirty years. When he finally explored his father’s rich legacy, he achieved a belated reconciliation with a man he had not really known.
It may be unfair that an accomplished scholar who has written some of the most significant investigations of the power inequities and ethics of life writing (Recovering Bodies, Vulnerable Subjects, Signifying Bodies), as well as an introduction to the genre as skilled as his On Memoir, should also be capable of writing authoritative, complex life writing itself. But G. Thomas Couser has done just that with Letter to My Father: A Memoir.