![]() Friend’s vulnerability - good and bad - provides both a warning and serves as an inspiration for fathers of all ages. “And then in the course of writing the book and making discoveries about him and making discoveries about myself, I realized actually, No, there are huge commonalities between us.”Īs Friend writes, the weightiest “hand-me-downs are habits of mind.” There’s no happy ending, just work, including reconsidering his father beyond the superficial and casting off the weight of the past. “I think at a certain point I decided I wrote him off and thought, I'm gonna be different and better and smarter and more emotional than he was,” Friend told Fatherly in early May. Friend had spent a lifetime distancing himself from his father’s tendencies only to find that he embodied them. ![]() “Because if she really knew me, she’d realize she’d made a mistake.”Ī child doesn’t receive a handbook for their dad, Friend says. ![]() “I wasn’t averse to committing to her completely, I was averse to committing to her completely at the price of being misunderstood,” Friend writes. Then Friend’s wife Amanda discovered his own lengthy history of infidelity. Then Friend discovered a collection of his father’s letters and correspondences that revealed several truths, including that he cheated on his mother. Firmly entrenched in middle-age, he’s a nationally ranked squash player.īut it’s a facade that couldn’t withstand the rigors of life.ĭay, as his father liked to be known, died after Friend turned in his first draft of the book. His family comes out of a magazine shoot, complete with a daughter who wears cat ears and a wife who’s an entrepreneurial dynamo. On the surface, Friend, 59, has an enviable one. As his father’s health declines, Friend measures every aspect of his own life. It’s also about marriage, family, and what happens when one man plunges into the truth behind his widely held assumptions.įriend’s book is not an easily digestible “Cat’s in the Cradle” lament. Tad Friend’s memoir, In the Early Times: A Life Reframed, is about his father, Theodore Wood Friend III, the former president of Swarthmore College, a public figure who remained inscrutable to his kids.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |