In My Father’s Footsteps
In My Father’s Footsteps
A Memoir
A brilliant father, a complicated legacy, and a son's hard-won journey of self-discovery.
William Matthews was a much-admired, award-winning poet and teacher who lived hard and died suddenly in 1997 at the age of fifty-five. He was a jazz fan, a wit and raconteur, a connoisseur of fine food and wine, and a thrice-married womanizer.
This clear-eyed, often wryly funny memoir pays homage to a charismatic father as the son struggles to step out from his considerable shadow. In examining his father's death (and life), Sebastian Matthews explores his own chaotic past. A child of divorce, he was shuttled throughout his boyhood between parents and many geographies. In a confusing symbiotic time between Bill's marriages, the teenage son and his father "were roommates and drinking buddies―I took care of him; he parented me." Later came the son's wanderings, the failed commitments.
Finally, Sebastian learns to confront Bill's mixed legacy. Striving to emulate the best of that "sad, happy man," he discovers new definitions of home, love, and marriage.
256 Pages | Available in Hardback or Paperback | Published January 2004
Praise
At the center of his personal labyrinth, Sebastian Matthews found his own father, a brilliant man, one of the finest American poets of his generation, who was meticulously careful in what he showed his son—and the world—about himself. In writing about what it was like to grow up in the shadow of a celebrated father who kept everything compartmentalized, Sebastian Matthews has performed a splendid act of portraiture, praise, and forgiveness.
—Charles Baxter