cover image Half the House: A Memoir

Half the House: A Memoir

Richard Hoffman. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), $20 (175pp) ISBN 978-0-15-100174-3

``He was the man I loved and the man I feared; a pair of images in the Viewmaster that I fumbled with, never quite able to click them into one.'' So writes the author of this moving boyhood memoir focusing on his father, whose wrestling with his own demons often estranged him from his family. Hoffman grew up in 1950s blue-collar Pennsylvania and early became acquainted with death--the deaths of his two brothers, disabled from muscular dystrophy--and with the attendant anger and sorrow that often pervades the lives of survivors. His mother's death; his alcoholism; his memories of sexual abuse by a coach, about which his father remained silent, became parts of Hoffman's troubled adulthood. In recovery, he was able to return to his father's house with his own children, open a dialogue with his lonely father and exorcise negative feelings, replacing them with hope and understanding of the past. Author tour. (Sept.)