Mark Matousek - The Boy He Left Behind: A Mans Search for His Lost Father

Praise for

The Boy He Left Behind

Mark Matouseks memoir The Boy He Left Behind begins with the gripping sentence, I was four years old when my father came back to kidnap me. Part reminiscence, part detective story, part spiritual musing, the book is more than the story of one mans search for his father; it is also a look at the meaning of life and how fathers contribute to that meaning.

The New York Times Book Review

Mark Matousek has written a family memoir that is tight and revealing. This is one fine book.

James McBride, author of The Color of Water

A gripping memoir that reads like a novel, with eccentric characters, snappy dialogue, surprising plot twists and stunning epiphanies. To read [The Boy He Left Behind] is to touch something fiery and alive, frightening but real.

New Age Journal

Matouseks account of his search for the father he hadnt seen since he was four [is] sharp and funny, thanks to the punchy dialogue and dead-on character sketches.

Elle

[A] searing memoirThe writing is exhilaratingdeeply soulful, compassionate, and self-scrutinizing. It is an explosive memoir filled with prose that sings; one that provokes readers to question where we come from and what our places are in this world. Matousekwrites from the heart. Read this book.

In Los Angeles Magazine

Interweaving the frustrating, suspenseful search for his long-lost father with unsparing recollections of a fatherless boyhood and his confrontation with a life-threatening disease, Mark Matousek expertly guides you through the particulars of his life into a harrowing meditation on the difficulties of becoming a man in a country without fathers. The Boy He Left Behind is beautifully crafted, artful and inspiring. It merits a place alongside the late Paul Monettes masterwork Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story. Like Monette, Matouseks triumph is twofold: In the book he has written, and in the man he has become.

Genre

Matouseks probing memoir of lost childhood and found history celebrates the power of manhood.

The Utne Reader

Matouseks perceptions are so keen and his prose so sophisticated, the personal frequently ascends to the universal in the best possible way.

Bay Area Reporter

This thoughtful and lovingly rendered portrait of an American childhood is a refreshing addition to the genre. Matousek not only tells his own story but brilliantly evokes the troubled lives of his mother and sisters with humor, honesty, and above all, compassion.

Kathleen Norris, author of The Cloister Walk and Amazing Grace

Mark Matousek has produced [a] riveting account of his searchat age thirty-eight, with the help of a private detectivefor the father who abandoned him at age four. A searing meditation on the psychic harm suffered by men and women without fathers, this wise odyssey wrestles with questions of life and death and the search for the meaning of ones existence.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Tough, spare, straightforward prose and the use of a classic private-eye figure give this book the flavor of a detective novel.The quest for the lost father is a traditional theme in literature. While seeking to understand the enigma of a fathers absence, the child can bring his or her own life into fictional focus. Matousek achieves that here. He also proves the search itself is significant. It yields results, whether or not the father is found.

Boston Herald

A sensitive meditation on death, family, and masculinity that asks hard questions about a culture without fathers.

Out

Praise for

Sex Death Enlightenment

Mark Matousek takes you everywhere his title promisesand then some. Sex Death Enlightenment is the most gripping and elegantly written memoir Ive read in ages. It tugged me ever onward like the best suspense novel, though I couldnt help lingering time and again to savor its wisdom.

Armistead Maupin, author of Tales of the City

Brave, beautiful, and brilliantly observed.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)

This is the kind of writingby turns vindictive and joyful, painful and amusingthat Matousek offers in his roller-coaster struggle to find meaning in life.Hes a good writer and true seeker, and when he sees how permeable [is] the boundary between life and death, we want to listen.

San Francisco Chronicle

Mark Matouseks Sex Death Enlightenment is a soul-searching and soul-awakening testament of a genuine spiritual journey for our time. He delves into the deepest parts of the spirit and the flesh, faces the toughest questions and problems without flinching, and emerges with faith and insight.

Dan Wakefield, author of Returning and New York in the Fifties

[An] edgy post-modern memoir.

James Atlas, The New York Times Magazine

An extraordinarily articulate chronicle.

Ram Dass, author of Be Here Now

Inspiring.

Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

I file Matouseks confessional addition to the bibliography of spiritual growth next to my old beloved copy of Ram Dasss Be Here Now and Deepak Chopras The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success.

Entertainment Weekly

ALSO BY MARK MATOUSEK

Sex Death Enlightenment (1996)

The Boy He Left Behind

A Mans Search for His Lost Father

mark matousek

RIVERHEAD BOOKS
NEW YORK