What My Father and I Don't Talk About, the follow-up to Michele Filgate's What My Mother and I Don't Talk About, is an anthology of 16 compassionate, nuanced essays probing the intricacies of family relationships.
Understanding a father's background can be the key to interpreting his later behavior. Isle McElroy had to fight for scraps of attention from their electrician father, who grew up in foster-care situations where he often suffered abuse; Susan Muaddi Darraj's Palestinian father was sent to the U.S. to make money to send home. Such experiences might explain why the men were unreliable or demanding as adults. Patterns threaten to repeat across the generations: Andrew Altschul realizes his father's hands-off parenting (he joked he'd changed a diaper "once") was an outmoded convention he rejects in raising his own son; Jaquira Díaz recounts a time when she and her father "battled debilitating depression in tandem"; she learned that his stemmed from his tragic loss of his first family.
Some take the title brief literally: Heather Sellers dares to ask her father about his cross-dressing when she visits him in a nursing home; Nayomi Munaweera is pleased her 82-year-old father could escape his arranged marriage, but the domestic violence that went on remains unspoken. Tomás Q. Morín's "Operation" has the most original structure, with the board game's body parts serving as headings. All the essays display psychological insight, but Alex Marzano-Lesnevich's--contrasting their father's once-controlling nature with his elderly vulnerability--is the pinnacle.
Despite the heavy topics--estrangement, illness, emotional detachment--these candid pieces thrill with their variety and their resonant themes. --Rebecca Foster, freelance reviewer, proofreader and blogger at Bookish Beck