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My Father Before Me: A Memoir
by Chris Forhan
Hardcover : 320 pages
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Introduction
An award-winning poet offers a multi-generational portrait of an American family—weaving together the lives of his ancestors, his parents, and his own coming of age in the 60s and 70s in the wake of his father’s suicide, in this superbly written, “fiercely honest” (Nick Flynn) memoir.
The fifth of eight children, Chris Forhan was born into a family of silence. He and his siblings learned, without being told, that certain thoughts and feelings were not to be shared. On the evenings his father didn’t come home, the rest of the family would eat dinner without him, his whereabouts unknown, his absence pronounced but not mentioned. And on a cold night in 1973, just before Christmas, Forhan’s father killed himself in the carport.
Forty years later, Forhan “bravely considers the way he is and is not his father’s son” (Larry Watson), digging into his family’s past and finding within each generation the same abandonment, loss, and silence in which he was raised. Like Ian Frazier in Family or Frank McCourt in Angela’s Ashes, Forhan shows his family members as both a part and a product of their time. My Father Before Me is a family history, an investigation into a death, and a stirring portrait of growing up in an Irish Catholic childhood, all set against a backdrop of America from the Great Depression to the Ramones.
Marrying the literary scope of memoirists Geoffrey Wolff and J.R. Moehringer with the intensity of family novels like The Corrections and We Are Not Ourselves, My Father Before Me is the kind of epic, immersive memoir that comes along once in a decade.
Editorial Review
Guest Review by George Hodgman
Photo Credit: Sigrid Estrada
Photo Credit: Alessandra Lynch
There are to me few more satisfying literary experiences than memoirs written by poets with singular, unmistakable voices, writer’s writers from Mary Karr to Nick Flynn and beyond who are able to arouse beauty, emotion and incredibly empathy as they become our special, unforgettable intimates. Chris Forhan’s wonderfully titled “My Father Before Me” is touched as well by the special emotion and darkness that an Irish background can bring in certain circumstances to an author’s work. No other heritage could have produced this voice.
In 1973, just before Christmas, Chris Forhan’s father committed suicide, leaving behind a wife and eight children. Forty years later—and now a father himself—Forhan sets out to discover the man who shaped his life by absence. Through conversations with his mother, siblings and relatives, through old photos and public documents, Forhan constructs a multi-generational portrait of an American family bound by silence and stoicism, heartache and tragedy, but also an irrepressible spring of resilience. From this panoramic tableau emerges Forhan's own coming of age story, set against the backdrop of 60s and 70s America, where Beatlemania and The Wizard of Oz telecast, first loves and smuggled beers, baseball games and Ramones concerts are the glistening prisms of young adult wonder.
I was moved by this book and especially absorbed. It is a truly emotionally gripping saga. I fell fast under the spell of this new struggling, emotional, and extremely honest friend. Forhan confronts the terrible, complicated legacy of a parent’s long past suicide, the message sent to a son that life is not worth living from a father he cannot forget. It is not an uncommon impulse in comparable books to go back and trace the history of damage and destruction behind such a tragedy. Forhan does that, leading us back through the pathways of his own family’s journey and through his own life. But this description suggests a familiar accomplishment when a nod to singularity is much more appropriate.
“My Father Before Me” is set apart by the special attributes of the very best books of its kind—characters one seems never to have encountered previously on the page and a narrator who attaches himself to our own memories and, moreover to our hearts and feelings. This belongs on the special shelves we keep for the books we cannot quite forget.
--George Hodgman, author of the New York Times bestseller, BETTYVILLE
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