Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Miscellaneous frontmatter
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: Writing Patrimony: The Son's Book of the Father as a Sub-genre
- Part I Challenging Authority
- Part II Memorialising Self-Denial
- Chapter Three ‘Words to Keep Fully Amongst Us’: Honouring the Father in Raimond Gaita's Romulus, My Father
- Chapter Four ‘I Really Was the Son of Such a Man’: Replacing the Father in Richard Freadman's Shadow of Doubt: My Father and Myself
- Part III Performing Masculinity
- Conclusion: The Turn to the Father in Autobiography
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter Four - ‘I Really Was the Son of Such a Man’: Replacing the Father in Richard Freadman's Shadow of Doubt: My Father and Myself
from Part II - Memorialising Self-Denial
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Miscellaneous frontmatter
- Acknowledgements
- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: Writing Patrimony: The Son's Book of the Father as a Sub-genre
- Part I Challenging Authority
- Part II Memorialising Self-Denial
- Chapter Three ‘Words to Keep Fully Amongst Us’: Honouring the Father in Raimond Gaita's Romulus, My Father
- Chapter Four ‘I Really Was the Son of Such a Man’: Replacing the Father in Richard Freadman's Shadow of Doubt: My Father and Myself
- Part III Performing Masculinity
- Conclusion: The Turn to the Father in Autobiography
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
If I didn't have the story appointed for me by my father, did that mean I didn't have a story? Not a Story: I realise now that Dad was calling the shots more than twenty years after his death. Fathers choose our stories for us […] and if we refuse the choice we go without.
—Paul John Eakin, Living AutobiographicallyMy greatest debt is to my father - for what he said, wrote and did while he was alive, and for what he left behind. I dedicate the book to his memory.
—Richard Freadman, Shadow of DoubtThe Child is Father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
—William Wordsworth, ‘My Heart Leaps Up’Roger Porter's recent Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers describes how a number of contemporary autobiographies and memoirs focus on fathers who engaged in lying or fabrication, intentionally concealing their identity from their families by various means. In the sub-genre he terms ‘The Child's Book of Parental Deception’ (Bureau 2), Porter shows how the autobiographical act is not only about unveiling the secrets and lies of the father, but a narrative of the son's or daughter's search, as the author becomes a kind of detective in a crime story: ‘Amassing clues, data, and facts, these writers, sleuths of selfhood, gather and sift evidence in the documents, attempting to establish a degree of certitude’ about the father's identity and hence, their own (10).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Australian PatriographyHow Sons Write Fathers in Contemporary Life Writing, pp. 87 - 112Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2013