A Lie about My Father - Softcover

Burnside, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1555974678 ISBN 13: 9781555974671

Publisher: Graywolf Press, 2007

Synopsis

My father told lies all his life and, because I knew no better, I repeated them. Lies about everything, great and small, were the very fabric of my world.

The lie in the title of astonishing memoir Lie About My Father is born of shame. Traveling around upstate New York in the nineties, John Burnside can't bear to share the truth about his father during a casual conversation with a hitchhiker. He covers his uneasiness with a lie. It felt natural to do so.

His father, abandoned as a baby on a stranger's doorstep, created a masterful web of deceit to erase this unbearable fact. John, even as a child, represented everything that was wrong with the world and became the recipient of his father's selfhatred in the form of enraged violence, and worse, petty, cruel belittlement. Growing up in the tough working-class neighborhoods of Scotland and later England, John learned to lie back to his father and, later, about his father.

About this title

Review:

"A book by a master of language, pushing language to do what it can. Fastidious, supple and unsparing, it is a book about lies that is more true than you can say." --Hilary Mantel, London Review of Books

From the Publisher:

A breathtakingly beautiful memoir of childhood

About this edition

• Publisher: Graywolf Press
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1555974678
• ISBN 13: 9781555974671
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 277