Daddy-An Absolutely Authentic Fake Memoir

By Andrea Troy

What do you get when a preeminent newpaper recruits an opportunistic rug saleman as its moral pundit? You get, Daddy-An Absolutely Authentic Fake Memoir, a sharp, witty, and charmingly crass fictional tell-all that reveals warts-like truths about contemporary life. Inspired by real scandals about unreal memoirs, the novel is narrated by Candor Schatz's daughter who portrays her father, writer of The Moralist column for The Worldly Times, as a man full of hypocrisy, hubris, and humbuggery.

An adult daughter’s tell-all eyes and loose tongue inform this satiric novel. This light-hearted, zany romp debunks consumerism, commercialism, and other everyday mind-boggling trangressions, is a hoot to read!


"Daddy is a credit to hypocrites everywhere!"
E. Spitzer, The Albany Press

"Unlike A Million Little Pieces, Daddy is the real thing! At last!"
O. Winfree

"This book not only is fabulous, it's fatuous! Discriminating readers, judge for yourself!"
The Scallion, Stinker Book Review

"I can't believe it!"
Mommy

"A. Troy sure knows how to tell a tale! Catch her in the wry!"
J.D.S

"Daddy is a whacko-just like the rest of the nation!"
V. Navasky

"Takes your mind off your nerves! Read it while you're waiting for your neck lift!"
Nora E.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 13, 2008
• ISBN: 9780595624645

Andrea Troy

A lifelong New Yorker whose varied work history, which some people might call "being all over the place," eventually led Andrea to become an adoption social worker and, for a number of years, writer and editor of a monthly group newsletter. Daddy-An Absolutely Authentic Fake Memoir, her debut novel, which was prescient because Trump-the-celebrity was not yet a presidential candidate, is about a character who is ridiculously good for a laugh, minus the aggravation! She currently is working on a novel about life's randomness and social influence, with a serious yet wry eye, and hopes people can relate to its characters and come away understanding and, perhaps, identifying with their state of mind.

Book preview

Copyright © 2008 by Andrea Troy

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-0-5955-2410-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-0-5956-2464-5 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 04/16/2020

In fond

memory of my father.

Fortunately, he was nothing like Daddy!

>>>>>>>>>>>>>

With thanks to my

dear sister, Carole, and good friend, Marilyn, for

their input in helping me bring Daddy to life.

Be not too hasty to trust or admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels but they act like men.

Dr. Samuel Johnson

Contents

Author’s Note

Intro

Da-Dee’s Zeitgeist

The Garlic Cove

The Essence of Daddy

Kisbitosis

The Moralist

The Column

Exposed

No Apologies

The Origins of Candor Schatz

What Kind of Lit is This Anyway?

On Film

Good Grief

Go For It

Olé

Finale

Appendix

About the Author

Author’s Note

N o offense is intended to any persons living or dead or half-dead who might identify with, or think they recognize, the purely fictional characters in these pages. This book springs entirely from my imagination, which naturally is influenced by everything I read, see, hear, smell, ingest, and imbibe. How could it be otherwise? That’s life.

Intro

I ’ll say it right now. Right up front. This book is a TELL-ALL . Now that may be a turn-off to you—a tell-all! —or it may be a turn-on, who knows? Only you. But I want you to be aware (and beware!) that it’s a tell-all about my father whom you probably know—know in the public persona sense, in the Hey, isn’t that whatshisname! sense—unless in the highly unlikely event you live on Mercury and don’t know him from a crater. Okay, I concede, maybe even if you live halfway round the world or in some very remote American backwater with nothing under your feet but grass.

Most people are familiar with him as the ubiquitous businessman known as The Rugman. He’s that real character! who’s been an item in the papers forever and often. Well, actually he wasn’t on their pages forever. There was a beginning, when he was getting established, before I was old enough to remember, and he began advertising in the local newspapers and later added bigger guys like The Wall Street Journal and The Worldly Times.

His face appeared in all print ads, which he wrote himself and which were way out there. When he started doing TV spots the public couldn’t get enough of him and he developed a sort of cult following. A newer generation, at least a certain segment newer generation, has gotten acquainted with him in his later incarnation as a syndicated columnist. (More on that soon.)

Well, in whatever way most people know my daddy, and however and whichever way you know him, I can tell you this for sure: it is not as his daughter. That honor falls to me.

This is a tell-all in the no-holds-barred sense. (You’re saying, But aren’t they all! when you know well that they aren’t.) In my case I have no desire to keep anything back and intend to objectively share it all. This book is not a lightweight or get-even diversion for me. Until a certain point in my life, I was Daddy’s Little Girl. To me he was beyond perfect, but things changed as I grew up. (Don’t go thinking he did anything sexually or otherwise untoward. No, that’s not it. It’s just that when I began to see him for who and what he was, he fell off the proverbial pedestal upon which I had placed him.)

You may think it’s kind of tacky for a child to tell it all although you’ve already been subjected to Mommie Dearest, A Child Called It, and Running With Scissors to name a few.

In my case, however, as you may have heard, daddy dropped dead unexpectedly, precipitously, and pretty prematurely last month—he was in near perfect health—so this isn’t as tacky as you think. He’s already out of the way and can’t be hurt, unless of course you believe in an afterlife, spirits, the supernatural and all things eternal or infernal, which I don’t.

Anyway, I must add, daddy was pretty dead, especially morally (which you’ll see is very relevant as the story progresses) before he mortally passed, so he’s not entitled to be offended. I’m not saying whether I would or wouldn’t have written the book had he lived. It was in the works, in my head at least, but his death freed—or stirred?—me and right after the funeral, the day after he died, in head I started in earnest to write this story. His story. My story of him.

Daddy first gained notoriety as an oddball carpet entrepreneur in New York before rolling down the Eastern Seaboard and later becoming a national phenomenon. Because his ads were so popular and his face so recognizable and he was sooo rambunctious, he became an item in the papers and appeared in articles and gossip columns. Many years ago People featured three pages worth of him. Even I was in it—there was one photo of our whole family.

Candor Schatz, the guy you knew as The Rugman, was my daddy. He grew his business from a storefront