Will I love And When Did You Last See Your Father??

The writer and poet Blake Morrison had a lifelong struggle to come to terms with his overbearing father.

Arthur Morrison, a Yorkshire doctor, was a smooth talker, a small-time cheat, who took pleasure in outwitting the authorities, living out his motto "I may not be right but I’m never wrong."

He was forever invading his children’s space, a habit which his son found painfully hard to resist, leading him to take up writing to escape this domineering influence. But when his father contracted cancer and lay dying, he was overwhelmed with grief and guilt.

It’s a moving, angry, and sometimes… show more.

A year before my own father died, I had read Blake Morrison’s tragicomic memoir about his father. I had marked several passages but the page I had book-marked with a card from a London restaurant contained the following lines: “I’ve become a death bore. I embarrass people at dinner parties with my morbidity. I used to think the world divided between those who have children and those who don’t; now I think it divides between those who have lost a parent and those whose parents are still alive.”

That line haunts me even more powerfully now, and I cannot think… show more.

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… show more.