Description
In thisdazzling John Irvingmemoir acclaimed New Yorker staff writer Tad Friend reflects on the pressures of middle age exploring his relationship with his dying father as he raises two children of his own
How often does a memoir build to a stomachchurning Icantbreathe climax in its final pages Brilliant intensely movingWilliam Finnegan Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Barbarian Days
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR The New Yorker
Almost everyone yearns to know their parents more thoroughly before they die to solve some of those lifelong mysteries Maybe just maybe those answers will help you live your own life But life doesnt stop to wait In his fifties New Yorker writer Tad Friend is grappling with being a husband and a father as he tries to grasp who he is as a son Torn between two families he careens between two stages in life On some days he feels vigorous on the brink of greatness when he plays tournament squash On others he feelsdistinctly weary troubled by his distance from millennial sensibilities or by his own face in the mirror by a grimace thats so like his fathers
His father an erudite historian and the former president of Swarthmore Collegehas long been gregarious and charming with strangers yet cerebral with his children Tad writes that trying to reach him always felt like ice fishing Yet now Tads father known to his family as Day seems concerned chiefly with the flavor of ice cream in his bowl and when pushed interested only in reconsidering his view of Franklin Roosevelt
Then Tad finds his fathers journal a trove of passionate confessions that reveals a man entirely different from the exasperatingly logical father Day was so determined to be It turns out that Tad has been selfdestructing in the same way Day hasa secret eachhas kept from everyone even themselves These discoveries make Tad reconsider his own role as a father as a husband and as a son But is it too late for both of them
Witty searching and profound In the Early Times is an enduring meditation on the shifting tides of memory and the unsteady pillars on which every family rests
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