My Father Before Me: A Memoir

A father's suicide prompts his son to break the silences in his family's history in this luminous memoir. Pushcart Prize%E2%80%93winning poet Forhan (Black Leapt In) was 13 in 1973 when his father committed suicide, leaving behind a wife and eight children but no suicide note. Forhan pieces together the traumatic childhoods of his parents, both of whom were abandoned by their fathers and grew up impoverished and insecure in the Great Depression; the experience, he conjectures, pushed his father into a taciturn, emotionally repressed, career-oriented style of manhood that starved his soul and prevented him from getting appropriate care for his scarred psyche. Much of the book is Forhan's vivid recreation of his suburban Seattle childhood, rich in details of kid culture; the small humiliations experienced by a reserved, inward boy; and the wracking tensions he felt from his parents' marriage. He also tells of his feckless adolescence and attempt at a career in broadcast journalism before becoming a poet. Forhan's characterization of his father's plight as an inability to talk about feelings sometimes feels strained%E2%80%94his father clearly suffered from a serious mental illness%E2%80%94but he movingly conveys the quiet, painful enigmas that people can pose to their families. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (June)