Brian Gresko - When I First Held You: 22 Critically Acclaimed Writers Talk About the Triumphs, Challenges, and Transformative Powers of Fatherhood
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When I First Held You: 22 Critically Acclaimed Writers Talk About the Triumphs, Challenges, and Transformative Powers of Fatherhood: summary, description and annotation
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Becoming a father can be one of the most profoundly terrifying, exhilarating, life-changing occasions in a mans life. Now 22 of todays masterful writers get straight to the heart of modern fatherhood in this incomparable collection of thought-provoking essays. From making that ultimate decision to have a kid to making it through the birth to tangling with a toddler mid-tantrum, and eventually letting a teen loose in the world, these fathers explore every facet of fatherhood and show how being a father changed the way they saw the worldand themselves.
One of the first things I learned about fatherhood was that my father was right: it was hard and it kicked the shit out of your life plan.Lev Grossman
I wanted to hold him. I wanted to hold him close and never let go. But we have to let go, dont we?Andre Dubus III
Bridges are engineered. Children are worked toward, clumsily, imperfectly, with a deep and almost religious faith in trial and error.Ben Greenman
If you counted up the nights Ive spent dancing to Strangers in the Night, those hours would stretch three times around the equator.Garth Stein
The most surprising aspect of parenting has been how much my pre-parenting life looks like a cloud in the rearview.Dennis Lehane
Contributors include
Andr Aciman, Chris Bachelder, David Bezmozgis, Justin Cronin, Peter Ho Davies, Anthony Doerr, Andre Dubus III, Steve Edwards, Karl Taro Greenfeld, Ben Greenman, Lev Grossman, Dennis Lehane, Bruce Machart, Rick Moody, Stephen OConnor, Benjamin Percy, Bob Smith, Frederick Reiken, Marco Roth, Matthew Specktor, Garth Stein, and Alexi Zentner
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The army of geniuses Brian Gresko has assembled to reflect on the beautiful, ridiculous, transformative, exhausting experience that is fatherhood does not disappoint. When I First Held You glows with radical honesty, and cuts through the hysterical noise of parenting chatter with incisive reflection and quiet revelation.
Adam Mansbach, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Go the F**k to Sleep
Full of humor, heart, and brilliance, When I First Held You contains everything I wish Id known (but probably wasnt ready to hear) about fatherhood before I became a father. Over and over again, as I read the essays Brian Gresko has deftly gathered here, I wanted to grab my wife, my son, and even strangers on the train and point emphatically at one line or another to say, This! This is what its like. The failures and triumphs of fatherhood have never sounded better than they do in the words of these fine writers.
Kristopher Jansma, author of The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards
Reading these essays confirms my belief that being a father is not only the most important thing a man can do in life, but also that its one of the hardest damn undertakings under the sun. That is, with the possible exception of writing about it honestly, which is what the authors in When I First Held You do, with humor and grace and sadness, to a striking, unflinching degree.
Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time
Brian Greskos superb collection captures the singular weirdness that befalls the male of the species: a woman expels another human from her body and, with that act, somewhere, a man becomes a father. With great intensity and thoughtfulness, and with no tigers and no French anywhere in sight, these accomplished writers wrestle with the fears, failures, and fears of failure that mark this transformation at a remove. These carefully vetted, entertaining tales vary wildly; from the anxious Park Slopians to the gay sperm donor afflicted with ALS, When I First Held You is a platinum album of reflections on modern fatherhood.
Daphne Uviller, coeditor of Only Child and author of Super in the City and Hotel No Tell
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WHEN I FIRST HELD YOU
Copyright 2014 by Brian Gresko
For a complete listing of individual copyrights and permissions, see page 273.
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
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eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-63462-2
An application to register this book for cataloging has been submitted to the Library of Congress.
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Berkley trade paperback edition / May 2014
Cover art by Warren Goldswain/Shutterstock
Cover design by Diana Kolsky
Interior text design by Kristin del Rosario
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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For Sara and Felix, with much love
Its the most terrifying day of your life, the day the first one is born. Your life as you know it is gone, never to return. But they learn how to walk, and they learn how to talk, and you want to be with them. And they turn out to be the most delightful people youll ever meet in your life.
DIALOGUE SPOKEN BY BILL MURRAY IN LOST IN TRANSLATION BY SOFIA COPPOLA
DARIN STRAUSS
You catch me at an interesting time.
Yesterday I may have failed my sonactually one of my twin sons, who is now almost six. He has a medical condition, which I dont want to specify here, and the thing is, yes. I did something that my wife thinks jeopardized his health. Not jeopardized in a huge way. But any jeopardy is more than enough jeopardy.
Well, heres the thing with me and fatherhood. Im a keen learner, surebut mostly Im an expert fuck-up and apology-offerer. And you probably are too. Michael Chabon says something to the effect of Every day you are a father is a day you fail. Ah, hindsight, hindsight.
Its not that nobody tells you this beforehand. They do. Its hard, they say when your wife gets that first ultrasound. (They is everybody.) They say, It will change your life. We hear those words, we think we know what they mean. We dont, we really dont. And after the unheeded words, we actually have the kid. (Or, in my experience, kids.) So, what happens? After the opening scenes of childbirth get acted out (after your days and your nights morph into thickets of wiping and swathing), you realize parenthood is an executive position. And a mid-management job. And entry-level. Decisions, hundreds of decisions a daythen the attempts at implementation. And the plastic Optimus Prime is always hiding behind the divan, the dainty chin is always pointed right at the hard pavement, the ambulance is always revving just outside.
You may see me and my kids walking into a kindergarten class. But what do I see? I see not them, exactly, but countless reminders of countless mistakestears, yellings, cracks in the playroom wall.
So: why do we do it, and why are you here, reading this book?
I think you are here to laugh about how hard other dads find things, but also to have something elsea hard-to-describe contentmentdescribed to you. Because the joys of fatherhood are real but not often put into accurate words. There is an intensity of some emotionnot happiness, definitely not happinessbut something like contentment, only more profound than that. Sometimes I feel it in my chest when I am with my kids: a warm fullness around the heart, like a water heater squirting everywhere inside the rib cage. That is not the kind of thing Ive seen elucidated very well, or often. Until I picked up this anthology. There are great essays here, wherein great writers do just that.
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