Letter to My Father

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.

In this engrossing and deeply-felt memoir, Couser's quest to understand and imagine his father's life gives the reader an affecting story of reclamation. Part biography, part detective story, this book attests to the emotional and literary power of a son's love., A late mid-life exploration of his father's many secrets leads Tom Couser to produce a memoir replete with courageous and hard-won insights. Couser's narrative reveals a son struggling to maintain respect, even love, amidst temptations to anger and disillusionment. Reading this wise book, we understand how memoir may ineluctably be a form of mourning., Letter to My Father is an epistolary memoir. Although it does not take the form of a letter, its writing is motivated in part by a desire to atone for an earlier well-meant letter which failed to open a conversation with a father in the throes of alcoholism. This search to know his father, fueled by regret and peppered with interrogatives, seeks to recreate a father he knew less well than did others. Most of us live with both unanswered and unasked questions about our fathers and mothers, aware that our parents are compounds of our limited personal memory and overwhelming blank space. Many never venture into the blank spaces, but Couser does, and this memoir is an honest assay to fill the blank space surrounding an ever-elusive father he resembles, envies, knows, and doesn’t know., Was he implicated in his father’s death from alcoholism and depression, a sad end to a life of early promise and adventure? In this carefully structured memoir a son searches for an answer as he explores his father’s letters. Resisting easy resolution, the story Couser uncovers of his father’s complex emotional life is rich in surprising knowledge and belated recognitions.

G. Thomas Couser is professor emeritus of English at Hofstra University and author of six previous books, including Memoir: An Introduction, published by Oxford UP in 2012.