The Books That Made My Father
There was much to do after my father died last year, following a prolonged bout with blood cancer. Not just the funeral arrangements but the other logistical matters: ridding my parents’ house of medical supplies, sorting through financial documents. My older sisters immediately set to work, diligently organizing and discarding things at the house in New Jersey where my parents had retired. But I was in no rush to clean out anything. I particularly didn’t want to dismantle my father’s book collection.
Some girls learn from their dads how to play softball or the art of fly-fishing. I absorbed from mine the power of words. He and I were quite alike, which made at times for a tempestuous rapport, but I mainlined his love of reading and the intensity with which he approached language. After he died, I began to gather some of his books as if to compile a syllabus of my own personal course of grief. Already among my prized possessions were his four-novel F. Scott Fitzgerald set, a 1945 anthology of British and American poetry that I filched from him a few decades ago and his Richard Ellmann of . Growing up, I used to spend hours in the basement of our Long Island home gazing at the spines of his hardbacks: ’s , by , ’s
