When I was young, and reading how-to books on how to write, I remember one author expounding on how young protagonists needed dead parents, absent parents, or abusive parents, so they could have the ability and motivation to go adventure. I remember thinking that was stupid, as plenty of kids all around me managed to have lots of adventures even with parents at home… and sometimes only because of the help and support of their parents.
It took growing up to see the advice wasn’t just stupid, it was lazy – writing absent parents is easier than writing supportive ones – and it was insidiously evil, as it kept reinforcing the “parents are awful or unimportant” message that schools tried to reinforce with “the state knows best; trust only the approved authorities, not your parents.”
So here’s to the fathers in our lives. The relationships will always be complicated as we grow up and grow older, because one of the great shocks of adult life is looking at “Mom and Dad”, and learning to see them not as “my mom and my dad”, but as two adults who have their own dreams, own hopes, own histories, own traumas and scars. Two people who were just trying to get through life and not make the same mistakes of their own parents, and do better for their children than they had… but end up making all new mistakes instead. And whose lives extend past being parents…
Last weekend I dropped everything and went up to help my father with a family thing. It was one of those “this meeting could have been a phone call, instead of short-notice plane tickets, hotel, and car rental”… but it was important to him that I was there in person, and I am growing uncomfortably aware that he is not, in fact, immortal. Better to drop everything and spend the time while he’s still here, as the day is coming when I’ll never have the opportunity again this side of heaven.
As we walked the edges of a corn field with his surviving cousins, they pointed to a small rise indistinguishable from the rest of the field. “Grandpa’s house used to be there. The gate was over there…”
“I can still remember painting that gate, every summer. The smell of linseed oil and white lead paint…”
“Do you remember the big rock? We were all learning to drive the car around it, except…”
“I did not hit it!”
“Yeah. The rest of us, he was saying ‘Go faster, go faster.’ You – he was saying, “Slow! Slow! Slow!”
The impact of one man still echoes in smiles and laughter, almost seventy years later… and in the relationship I have with his grandson, who tried to be as good a parent to me as he could figure out how. He did a really good job.
How to put that into a book… that’ a whole different challenge, but I will try to be up to it.
What books do you recommend that do fathers or fatherhood well?
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David Weber spends a lot of time on fatherhood in the Safehold series. There’s Haarldh of Charis, who is an excellent father to his son, Cahyleb. Then Cayleb, “feeling the bone-deep programming of fatherhood,” sweep over him when his daughter Alahna is born. Even the villains get their moments as fathers: Hektor of Corisande is a cold-blooded, ruthless, potentially treacherous ruler, but he loves his children and wants what’s best for them.
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Some of Jim Kjelgaard’s books had good fathers, IIRC. I also think the hero’s dad in Cotilllion is underrated. The heroine’s dad in Civil Contract is *not* underrated, except by his thin-skinned son-in-law, but he is awesome.
Civil Contract — one of my all time faves. I read it young and didn’t appreciate it, but that didn’t last.
It’s a kids book but I love The Good Master by Kate Seredy. And the dad is still amazing in the sequel, The Singing Tree.
Ilona Andrews’ Hidden Legacy series first two books offer a backward view of an excellent father. At the opening of the first book in that series the father has already died, but as time moves forward we see the choices that he made and that he had taught his family to recognize trouble. He then taught a solid core of ethics, as well as critical thinking to help guide their choices. We don’t meet him. We just see his gifts in action. (Fore shadowing here, as well as a poor pun. Mine.)
Good fathers and bad fathers feature in entirely different books, because the plot must fit.
My characters, the human ones anyway, all have parents. Some better than others, some alive and some not, but they have them. They don’t necessarily feature prominently in the stories, except for Jimmy’s mother Sandra. She’s a feature.
The advice “young protagonists needed dead parents, absent parents, or abusive parents” is certainly a thing in recent literature. Taken as gospel by many, apparently.
But I recall that Tom Swift had a dad and a grandad as well, to help him along. And while I don’t remember too many of the waifs with no family I’ve been subjected to in stories, I certainly remember Tom Swift.
So possibly take that advice with a large grain of salt.