These Boys and Their Fathers: A Memoir

by Don Waters

Overview

In 2010, Don Waters set out to write a magazine story about a surfing icon who had known his absentee father. It was an attempt to find a way of connecting to a man he never knew. He didn’t imagine that the story would become a years-long quest to understand a man who left behind almost nothing except for a self-absorbed autobiography for his abandoned son.

These Boys and Their Fathers touches on Waters’s early life with his single mother—and her string of dysfunctional men—and his later search for and encounters with his father, but it quickly expands into a gripping account of the life of a 1930s pulp writer, also named Don Waters, with whom Waters becomes obsessed. This wildly original book blends memoir, investigative reporting, and fiction to sort out difficult aspects of family, masculinity, and what it means to be a father.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609386795
Publisher:	University of Iowa Press
Publication date:	10/01/2019
Edition description:	1
Pages:	230
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Don Waters won the Iowa Short Fiction Award for his story collection, Desert Gothic. His fiction has been anthologized in the Pushcart Prize, Best of the West, and New Stories from the Southwest. His journalism has appeared in The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Outside. Born and raised in Reno, Nevada, he currently lives in Portland, Oregon. Sunland is his first novel. 

What People are Saying About This

Andrew Sean Greer

“There is an empty space on the bookshelf where a search for a father belongs, and Don Waters has written it. As with most
fathers, it is a story of filling in the gaps, reliving memories and imagined memories, and heading to the edge of experience and
truth. Heartbreaking, ambiguous, funny, and wise, These Boys and Their Fathers is the book so many of us have been waiting
for.”—Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Less

Ben Fountain

“Generous, scrupulously honest, and gorgeously original in its telling, Don Waters’s These Boys and Their Fathers is an absolute knockout of a memoir. Waters shape-shifts among genres, voices, and eras to get at the heart of the matter, which happens to be the hardest human matter of all: how to live at peace with ourselves and our family, both the family we’re born into and the family we make for ourselves. This book is one of the wisest, most searching explorations of an individual life I have ever encountered, one whose humanity and heart offer universal appeal.”—Ben Fountain, author, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

David Shields

“An extraordinarily powerful, moving, and urgent exploration of the crossroads between masculinity, paternity, fantasy, ‘truth,’ and howling sadness.”—David Shields, author, Reality Hunger

Editorial Reviews

These Boys is a powerfully candid story of discovering "closure" through accepting and living alongside the pain and truth.”—Shelf Awareness

Shelf Awareness

Don Waters' latest book opens with a gut punch: a letter introducing himself, as a high school senior, to the father who left when he was a toddler. These Boys and Their Fathers blends memoir, reportage and fiction in a disquieting yet absorbing, bare-it-all plunge into manhood, family and fatherhood.

The Oregonian

Wide-ranging in its quest for understanding, These Boys and Their Fathers offers an emphatic record of the scars of abandonment.”—The Boston Globe
 

“The whole of Don Waters’s memoir brings to mind Frankenstein’s creature: assembled from parts; shouldn’t be alive; yet lives and invokes great compassion. . . . Don Waters has clearly escaped the fate of Frankenstein’s creature, and his memoir provides a valuable road map for others who may feel equally adrift at sea.”—Hippocampus Magazine
 

From the Publisher

2019-07-28
A father's absence looms large in his son's life.

Waters (Fiction Writing/Lewis & Clark Coll.; The Saints of Rattlesnake Mountain: Stories, 2017, etc.) makes his nonfiction debut with a frank, earnest memoir about his search for a father. Because he had no contact with his father growing up, the author felt bereft of the love and guidance that he envied in other father-son relationships. Being fatherless obsessed him: "Any man whose father leaves can understand the shame, confusion, and anger generated by such a primal loss." Although he was hungry for answers about why his father left and stayed away, when his father unexpectedly sent him a brief autobiography, it took Waters years to finally read it because he was "frightened by what the pages might say about him or about me." Surprised to discover that his father had been a surfer—a sport Waters himself loved—he decided to write a magazine article about surfing, imagining that researching and writing "could lead to something deeper, something important, and something curative." The author's need for healing led him to several failed attempts to write a memoir and also to undergo therapy for more than a decade, which he recounts in some verbatim conversations. When he suggested to his therapist that he should stop dwelling on his father and give up the memoir project, she dissuaded him. Unfortunately, writing as therapy may be more successful for the author than readers, who are confronted with too many assorted details and digressions: memories of various father figures, frustration about his writing, reflections on his relationship with his wife, their attempts to have a baby, his doubts about his own capacity to be a father, and a parallel story about another Don Waters, a sailor and writer born in the late 1800s whose family life provides a useful reality check on the author's own illusions. "It's a great example," he tells his therapist, "that no matter how someone's life looks from the outside, no one's life is ever perfect."

A sincere but flawed recounting of a search for self-knowledge.

Kirkus Reviews