Fatherless: A Memoir - Softcover

Maillard, Keith

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1949199134 ISBN 13: 9781949199130

Publisher: West Virginia University Press, 2019

Synopsis

This story begins with a phone call out of the blue: a lawyer tells a writer that his ninety-six-year-old father, with whom he has had no contact since the age of three and whom he has twice tried to find without success, has just died, leaving him nothing. Half-reluctant, half-fascinated, both angry and curious, Keith Maillard begins to research his father's life. The result is a suspenseful work of historical reconstruction-a social history often reading like a detective story-as well as a psychologically acute portrait of the impact of a father's absence. Walking a tightrope between the known and the unknown, and following a trail that takes him from Vancouver to Montreal to his native Wheeling, West Virginia, Keith Maillard has pulled off a book that only a novelist of his stature could write.

About this title

Review:

"Fatherless is Keith Maillard's haunting response to that most ancient curse: Why, father, did you desert me? How, father, should I love you?"
Clark Blaise, author of I Had a Father

"Marvelous and brutally honest."
Marc Harshman, author of Woman in Red Anorak and poet laureate of West Virginia

"This memoir is an astonishing act of generosity and tenacity, exploring the profound flaws of one family's dynamics and the resiliency of the human spirit."
Eden Robinson, author of Son of a Trickster

About the Author:

Keith Maillard is the author of fourteen novels, most recently Twin Studies. Born and raised in West Virginia, he has lived in Vancouver for most of his adult life. He has been a musician, photographer, and journalist, and has taught creative writing at the University of British Columbia since 1989.

About this edition

• Publisher: West Virginia University Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1949199134
• ISBN 13: 9781949199130
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 239