My father, the pornographer A memoir

Review by Booklist Review

In his third memoir, Offutt (No Heroes: A Memoir on Coming Home, 2002) turns his perceptive eye on his erratic father, an insurance salesman who became a successful erotic novelist. After Andrew Offutt's death, Chris returned to his childhood home in Kentucky to sort through his father's possessions, a task his siblings rejected. Bitter and prone to fits of rage, Andrew forbade his children from entering his home office, where Chris now attempts to organize fan gifts, sci-fi paraphernalia, medieval weapons, and 1,800 pounds of his father's pornographic and increasingly violent fiction. Originally a side project meant to cover the cost of Chris' dental care, Andrew's passion for writing porn led to more than 400 publications, many typed by his wife and released under various pseudonyms. As Chris unravels the mysteries of the man who baffled and terrified him, he reflects on his childhood escapes in literature and nature, his writerly ambitions, and his role as a father. The result is a heartbreaking tale about identity, overcoming fear, and forgiving someone more committed to his craft than his family.--Fullmer, Jonathan Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

A son grapples with the lurid, overbearing legacy of his eccentric father in this conflicted memoir. Novelist and screenwriter Offutt (The Good Brother) catalogued the literary oeuvre of his father, Andrew, after his death. The list included more than 400 pornographic novels published under various pseudonyms from the 1970s through the 1990s (sample titles: Oversexed Shana; The Submission of Claudine) and dozens of more mainstream sci-fi and fantasy novels. The fraught experience of creating that catalogue frames Offutt's gnarled recollections of Andrew: a domestic tyrant whose wife and children tiptoed around his temper; a sharp if oddly balanced intellectual; an epic crank who bombarded presidents and popes with cantankerous letters and alienated almost everyone; an insecure narcissist who felt safe only within his fantasies or soaking up the applause of acolytes at science fiction conventions. Offutt nicely balances a fascinating, appalling portrait of this larger-than-life figure with shrewdly observed insights into Andrew's secret frailties and the intense, squirmingly awkward relationship that sprouted between them. It's also the story of Offutt's own coming-of-age as he flees his father's claustrophobic house for the freedom of the Kentucky hills where he grew up, and then embarks on a peripatetic writer's life. This is a frank, clear-eyed, but subtle memoir that works through raw emotion to arrive at an empathetic understanding of what fractures and binds families. (Feb. 9) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A fond memoir of life with a prolific writer of science fiction and pornography. Screenwriter (True Blood, Weeds) and essayist Offutt (No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home, 2002, etc.) describes his father, Andrew, as "fiercely self-reliant, a dark genius, cruel, selfish, and eternally optimistic." In the opening chapters, the author charts his father's declining health and grave prognosis from alcohol-induced cirrhosis, which spurred the author to return home to Kentucky in the midst of his own divorce. Offutt delves deep into his father's history as a former traveling salesman who carted his family around to sci-fi conventions and who harbored a temperamental persona with a penchant for creating alter egos. Beginning with an Old West novel written when he was just 12, Andrew was in many ways "an old-school pulp writer" whose early novels, penned in the hushed privacy of a locked home office and often under pseudonyms, helped finance Offutt's desperately needed orthodontia. Upon his death in 2013, the mother lode of his father's squirreled away gemstones, coins, and assorted clutter was unearthed, but it was the 1,800 pounds of manuscripts and papers bequeathed to Offutt that exposed Andrew's true nature and later career as a "workhorse in the field of written pornography." The author's father produced an incredibly imaginative oeuvre of hard-core graphic erotica, from ghost porn to inquisition torture, incrementally (and chillingly) escalating in violence against women as time went onsomething Andrew believed prevented him from becoming a serial killer. Admitting to his mother that his "Dad was the most interesting character I've ever met" speaks volumes about not only the kind of father Andrew was to his son, but also the kind of son Offutt became because of (and in spite of) the things he'd been taught. Though his relationship with his father was distant, melancholic, and precarious, Offutt quite movingly weaves his personal history into a fascinating tapestry of a compulsive writer with a knack for the naughty. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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My Father, the Pornographer Chapter One MY FATHER grew up in a log cabin near Taylorsville, Kentucky. The house had twelve-inch walls with gun ports to defend against attackers, first Indians, then soldiers during the Civil War. At age twelve, Dad wrote a novel of the Old West. He taught himself to type with the Columbus method--find it and land on it--using one finger on his left hand and two fingers on his right. Dad typed swiftly and with great passion. He eventually wrote and published more than four hundred books under eighteen different names. His novels included six science fiction, twenty-four fantasy, and one thriller. The rest was pornography. When I was nine, Dad gave me his childhood copy of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. The old hardback was tattered, the boards held by fraying strips of fabric, the pages pliant and soft. It is a coming-of-age narrative about thirteen-year-old Jim Hawkins, who discovers a secret map, leaves England, and returns with a large share of pirate treasure. I loved the fast-paced story and the bravery of young Jim. On paper cut from a brown grocery sack, I carefully drew an island with a coastline, water, and palm trees. A dotted line led to a large red X. My mother suggested I show the map to my father. Dad wiped coffee on the paper and wadded it up several times, which made it seem older. He used matches to ignite the edges of the map, then quickly extinguished the flame. This produced a charred and ragged border that enhanced the map's appearance, as if it had barely survived destruction. Because of the fire involved, we were alone outside, away from my younger siblings. Dad was selling insurance at the time, rarely home, his attention always focused elsewhere. I enjoyed the sense of closeness, a shared project. Dad said that he drew maps for most of the books he wrote, and I resolved that if I ever published a book, I'd include a map. Twenty years later I did. In 1990 I called my father with the news that Vintage Contemporaries was publishing Kentucky Straight, my first book. A long silence ensued as Dad digested the information. "I'm sorry," he said. "What do you mean?" I said. "I didn't know I'd given you a childhood terrible enough to make you a writer." His own father wrote short stories in the 1920s. During the Depression, my grandfather was forced to abandon his literary ambitions to save the family farm and pursue a more practical education in engineering. He died young, a year before my father published his first story. Dad never knew what it was like to have a proud father and didn't know how to be one himself. After the publication of Kentucky Straight, people began asking Dad what he thought of my success. Buried in the question was the implication that the son had outdone the father. My work was regarded as serious literature, whereas he wrote porn and science fiction. Twice I witnessed someone insinuate that Dad should be envious. Invariably my father had the same response. His favorite adventure novel was The Three Musketeers, in which young D'Artagnan wins respect through his magnificent swordplay, taught to him by his father. Every time someone asked Dad about my success as a writer, he said he was happy to be D'Artagnan's sword master, voicing pride in my accomplishments but taking credit for them, as well. It was as close as he ever came to telling me how he felt about my work. Excerpted from My Father, the Pornographer by Chris Offutt All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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