It may be unfair that an accomplished scholar who has written some of the most significant investigations of the power inequities and ethics of life writing (Recovering Bodies, Vulnerable Subjects, Signifying Bodies), as well as an introduction to the genre as skilled as his On Memoir, should also be capable of writing authoritative, complex life writing itself. But G. Thomas Couser has done just that with Letter to My Father: A Memoir.

Biography

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.

Sharon O'Brien, author The Family Silver: A Memoir of Depression and Inheritance.

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.

Roger Porter, Emeritus Professor of English, Reed College, and author of Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers.

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.

Margaret Gibson, author of The Prodigal Daughter, a memoir, and 11 books of poetry.

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.

Paul John Eakin, Indiana University, author of Living Autobiographically: How We Create Identity in Narrative.