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Welcome

I started this blog in 2013 to share my reflections on reading, writing and psychology, along with my journey to become a published novelist.​  I soon graduated to about twenty book reviews a month and a weekly 99-word story. Ten years later, I've transferred my writing / publication updates to my new website but will continue here with occasional reviews and flash fiction pieces, and maybe the odd personal post.

ANNE GOODWIN'S WRITING NEWS

Four Fictional Absent Fathers

17/6/2017

8 Comments

 

In a companion essay to her novella, Her Father’s Daughter, author Marie Sizun asks:

What is a father? That’s the real question. A father –  even if he’s imperfect or absent – is a mythical, irreplaceable figure, especially for a girl. If he’s not there during her childhood, she’s likely to spend a long time drifting in vain in search of him.

Having deprived the male narrator of my second novel,
Underneath, of a father, I would argue that the gap is equally damaging for a boy, as outlined in my recent guest post The impact of the absent father in Underneath.
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Children can’t discern what they lack until they witness the missing element in the lives of others. In the novella,
Her Father’s Daughter, a young girl whose father has left the family glimpses through the kitchen window another father playing with his daughter (p141):

He has that gleam of admiration and tenderness … he throws himself at his daughter, picks her up in his arms, way up high, and spins her around with him. She shrieks with mock terror and delight.

What’s most telling, I think, is the deceptively simple next line (p142):

The child closes the window.

She simply cannot bear the sight of another child enjoying what she herself has lost.

In Underneath, Steve expresses a similar sentiment when he feigns derision for his friend’s freedom to play rough with his father (p166-7, written, incidentally, before I read Her Father’s Daughter):

I go to the window and watch a seagull flap across the sky … I glance back as Jaswinder climbs onto the sofa, straddling his daddy like I’d ride the leather pig … downstairs.

I fix my gaze on the hills across the sea.

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Some fathers are physically present but emotionally absent. There’s a yearning for a father’s attention in
my debut novel, Sugar and Snails, when Diana, whose father lives at home but takes no responsibility for childcare, imagines swapping houses with best friend Geraldine (p69):

I imagined going home to her house at half past three, scrabbling with her five sisters for a place at the table for our cream crackers and milk. I imagined playing with her dolls and her dad swinging me into the air when he came home from the pub with bottles of pop.
The sense of longing extends into adulthood. Grappling with infertility, and a lifetime of her mother’s lies, Freya, in The Daughter of Lady Macbeth, is hyperconscious of those who have what she never had (p98):

Little girls and their daddies. You see them everywhere these days. Shampooing hair at the swimming baths, rubbing sore knees in the park, leaning sideways to keep hold of a tiny hand … One day I would be weaving through the crowd and a man’s voice would stir the marrow in my bones.

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Later, when her father finds her, she’s conscious of the depth of her desire (p235):

I knew how little he had in the fridge. I could have eaten it all and still not been satisfied. I felt the same way about him. I was too old to call him Daddy, too old to be sat on his knee and tickled and tossed up in the air, but I needed something.

What other novels have you come across exploring the impact of a father’s absence? I found a
Guardian article listing ten such books, but confess I haven’t read any. Have you?

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I wanted to schedule this post around Father’s Day (18th June this year in the UK), hoping I’d be able to pair it with a 99-word story based on prompt from Carrot Ranch. When this week’s topic came through, I wasn’t so sure. How could I blend fatherhood with dawn? In the end, I had a lot of fun:

No hiding from the light.

“Let’s spend the night on the tor,” she said. “It must be romantic to watch the sun rise behind the hills.”

He was about to say he liked his sleep too much, when it dawned on him she might have more than the view in mind.

Weeks later, her father collared his father, as the sky bled into the factory’s silhouette. Back home, his father hauled him from his bed. “How could you be so dim?”

Rosy ribbons filtered through the bedroom curtains. The dawn of new life meant a new role for him. No hiding from the light.

Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
8 Comments
D. Avery link
17/6/2017 08:36:22 am

Looks like you got plenty of fathers in that flash after all. Grand.

Reply
Annecdotist
20/6/2017 05:21:25 pm

Yes, and it might have been easier to follow whose father was whose if I’d given them names, but somehow they seemed to want to be anonymous!

Reply
Jeanne Lombardo link
20/6/2017 09:24:52 pm

Big sigh here. My daughter suffers from a lack of a loving father figure (for which I bear the guilt of my poor choices). And Father's Day is especially hard for her. So I found your reviews and snippets from Sugar and Snails resonant with my state of mind. It's not surprising that the relationship between fathers and their children makes for rich literature. Enjoyed your flash too. As you did, I wrote a flash on the temptation the young feel to witness the dawn, or the way the dawn can creep up on you after a night of stolen delights. Always in willful ignorance of the consequences!

Reply
Annecdotist
22/6/2017 02:57:34 pm

Thanks, Jeanne. Although I wanted to link this post to Father’s Day, it’s not such a big thing in the UK – at least it wasn’t when I was growing up so I see it mainly as a product of Big Capitalism (unlike Mother’s Day which has more traditional roots). But whether or not marked by a special day, fathers certainly matter and painful to miss out on that experience but it must help to a degree for your daughter that you are at least conscious of that lack. I think it’s great how young men these days seem a lot more interested in being a good father – and I trust that the boy in my flash will get there eventually!

Reply
Lisa @ The Meaning of Me link
22/6/2017 02:33:12 am

I admit I haven't read any on that list, either. Interesting, though, and I may look for them and some of the ones you have here. This is a really great post and a topic that is kind of fascinating. The importance of the father/daughter is staggering in so many ways. I've read nonfiction on the topic, but definitely haven't explored in fiction. Thanks for the great read and inspiration here!
Great flash tie-in, too. Love your use of dawn and dim in there to illustrate what's happening. Well done.

Reply
Annecdotist
22/6/2017 03:00:02 pm

Glad you agree it’s a fascinating topic, Lisa, and I’m a little curious about the angle taken by the non-fiction you read on the subject. And thanks for that positive feedback on my flash.

Reply
Norah Colvin link
25/6/2017 08:22:38 am

Interesting post, Anne. The father - daughter relationship is definitely a complex one. The relationship I had with mine colours how I view the way other fathers and daughters interact. I love your flash. I hope the new life has a good father figure throughout life.

Reply
Annecdotist
26/6/2017 12:13:17 pm

Thanks for reading, Norah. I think there’s an awful lot more to be said about the subject than can be found in these two novels. I do think fatherhood is improving generally so maybe there’s hope for this
.

Reply

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