In My Father's Footsteps: A Memoir - Hardcover

Matthews, Sebastian

3.54

24 ratings by Goodreads

9780393057386: In My Father's Footsteps: A Memoir

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393057380 ISBN 13: 9780393057386

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

A brilliant father, a complicated legacy, and a son's hard-won journey of self-discovery.

William Matthews was a much-admired, award-winning poet and teacher who lived hard and died suddenly in 1997 at the age of fifty-five. He was a jazz fan, a wit and raconteur, a connoisseur of fine food and wine, and a thrice-married womanizer.

This clear-eyed, often wryly funny memoir pays homage to a charismatic father as the son struggles to step out from his considerable shadow. In examining his father's death (and life), Sebastian Matthews explores his own chaotic past. A child of divorce, he was shuttled throughout his boyhood between parents and many geographies. In a confusing symbiotic time between Bill's marriages, the teenage son and his father "were roommates and drinking buddies―I took care of him; he parented me." Later came the son's wanderings, the failed commitments.

Finally Sebastian learns to confront Bill's mixed legacy. Striving to emulate the best of that "sad, happy man," he discovers new definitions of home, love, and marriage.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

A son's relationship with his father can have profound bittersweet turns as boy grows into man. As Sebastian Matthews relates in this touching, often achingly personal memoir, that journey can be even more trying when son follows famous father's footsteps in both profession and personal dysfunction. William Matthews was a renowned, financially successful poet and academic, a seasoned lover of wine, women and song. His sudden death at 55 both shatters and focuses his son, and spurs him to a literary reconciliation that is as haunting as it is heart-rending. For beneath the elder Matthews' refined, world-wise tastes and sharp-witted poetry lie tragic compulsions--the very same trappings that seem to bless Sebastian with an uber-cool adolescence prove to have their own dark, destructive lining. Sebastian is not out to desconstruct his father, but rather to refine a deeper understanding and acceptance of him and their relationship--love is almost too tepid a word for it. --Jerry McCulley

About the Author:

Sebastian Matthews, writer, poet, and teacher at Warren Wilson College, is the editor of a new literary journal, Rivendell. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.