There are many things for which I owe gratitude to my dad. Most of all, I am grateful to the only man who could love my mother more than me.

But in so many ways I’m still that kid, not sure exactly how to be emotionally intimate with a girl without feeling weak, not sure my work is good enough, not sure if the people...

Boys do not long for fathers who will usher them through the gauntlet of psychological disconnect. They long for fathers who have themselves survived intact. Boys do not ache for their father’s masculinity. They ache...

I bring this up because in writing some thoughts about a father, or not having a father, I feel as though I’m writing a book about a troll under a bridge or a dragon. For...

If one could speak two languages well and was raised on tea and baguettes for breakfast,in places where the most mundane daily business on the street is conducted in four languages, where horse carts park...

Fatherhood is sacred.

I know you’re no worse than most men but I thought you were better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.

Ever boy deserves a father.

Thoughts, pictures of him would come to me just a second after waking, shocking me from the forgetfulness of sleep, striking blows that were almost physical. And even in sleep I was not completely free....

…the most devastating thing Finney could have said. Not that Peter was hated by his father. But that he’d been loved all along. He’d interpreted kindness as cruelty, generosity as meanness, support as tethers. How...

They both looked at me in a way that was fast becoming familiar: two parts bafflement to one part awe at my talent for making a bad situation worse.

If you can walk with the crowd and keep your virtue, or walk with Kings-nor lose the common touch; If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you; If all men count with you, but...

He wishes he could remember everything. Anything. He doesn’t sense a bone in his body that can feel compassion or worthiness. Self-pity hides away as well, the lowest form of emotion not even capable of...

If not for sports, I do not think my father would have ever talked to me.

My father greeted me with his usual air of mild regret.

Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry.

And you’re wounded in the same place. That’s what fathers do if they don’t heal their wounds. They wound their children in the same place.

Sir Walter, being strangely surprised and put out of his countenance at so great a table, gives his son a damned blow over the face. His son, as rude as he was, would not strike...

That had been the end of Communism. I had a feeling watching the tape that America would be next, but for once I kept my mouth shut. In my silence I felt our common ground:...

I spent half my childhood trying to be like my dad. True for most boys, I think. It turns with adolescence. The last thing I wanted was to be like my dad. It took becoming...

Why did you do it? Give up everything to raise another man’s son?’His father did look up at that. ‘I didn’t raise another man’s son,’ he said sharply. ‘I raised my own.