The best books about maddening dads

I couldn’t put this book down! It changed what I felt was possible in a graphic story. When I started this memoir, knowing Alison Bechdel from her great, long-running cartoon strip “Dykes to Watch Out For,” I thought it would be light, funny, and well-drawn. I was right about the last two.

I love how Bechdel captures her characters’ quirky reactions and geographies—her “Fun Home” was the Pennsylvania funeral home where Bechdel grew up—and the comic elements of 1970s family life. (She and I are about the same age.)

I did not expect, and was knocked out by the book’s deeper emotions. I found Bechdel’s capturing the way her coming out changed her relationship with her stern, fastidious father, who kept his own homosexuality secret for years, very moving. 

People have been writing about maddening dads for a long time (see Lear!), but in my own reading life, Blake Morrison’s charismatic, impossible father was the original. Poet Morrison wrote this unforgettable book at a time when memoirs were not the rage, and Morrison is English, so you know confessional revelations are not in his blood. 

I was then (and am still, basically) a fiction writer, so traveling with Morrison through vivid, funny childhood memories of his father, interspersed with poignant accounts of his father’s later illness and decline, was a great adventure, but not one I thought related to my own work. Still, I think it planted the seed of a related story I would try to write thirty years later.

With Laura Warrell’s lyrical book, I discovered a different sort of narcissist dad—the musician kind! Also, the womanizer kind. 

I don’t know much about jazz, but you don’t need to know about it to get swept up in Warrell’s story of a trumpeter with the great name Circus Palmer and the female players around him, including his yearning daughter Koko. I admire how Warrell brings you close to Circus and the many women characters: this is no simple story about a man ignoring or abandoning his loved ones.

Circus comes to life, you can almost hear him play, and the novel leaves you with the awareness that a young woman can love and be shaped by a dad, even an absent, maddening one—and even that relation can have a sweet melody.

I read two great memoirs for a panel I moderated about daughters and fathers. At the event, I enjoyed watching Leslie Absher and Leta McCollough Seletzky meet and realize how much they had in common.

Both authors had dads who kept secrets— big, political secrets. Leta Seletzky’s dad worked as an undercover officer for the Memphis Police Department in the 1960s: he was “The Kneeling Man” in the famous photograph taken after King’s death. 

This may sound odd, but I related to Leta Seletzky’s emotional tale of how she gradually got to know her father, as an adult, by uncovering the many layers of his life story. 

That’s right—Charles Dickens! I laughed, I cried, I stomped my feet.

I’ve been in a Dickens reading group since the pandemic and am constantly amazed by how funny he is. His scenes are so colorful and alive that they play like brilliant movies in your brain. In other works, Dickens has some saccharine father-daughter pairs who can induce an eye roll, but in this book his bone-chilling father made me sit up. 

The icy-hearted Paul Dombey dotes on his sweet but feeble young son while completely ignoring his adorable and kind little daughter, who barely gets any scraps of his affection. We daughters read on, waiting for the Scrooge-like Dombey to learn his lesson over the course of the novel. Don’t ignore your daughters, dammit!—Oh, did I say that aloud?