Will They Love Me

A divorced father who is a noncustodial parent often becomes ""Uncle Dad'' to his children, writes the author. In this memoir, Smith (Country Music, etc.), who became such a parent in 1979, records the suffering that divorce inflicted on his family. His efforts to keep close fatherly contact with his twins, a son and daughter, are vividly recounted. The children's rocky passage through adolescence, exacerbated by his impotence as an absentee authority figure, resonates. Candid about responsibility for the problems in his marriage and the fallout on the children, Smith eloquently expresses his feelings of failure, loss, guilt and anger, until, finally, he gives voice to a kind of peace he has achieved in his current role as ``patriarch in training'' for a new family with his new wife. (May 18)