Tag: fathers

A son approaching middle age looks back on a volatile relationship with his father.

Brian Gresko considers the lingering consequences when the only touches between father and son are abusive ones.

“In a poem, we feel what is there, but also what is not.”

For retailers, fathers have simple needs: books, steaks, gadgets. But the dads most of us grew up with, and without, are a more inscrutable lot.

Contemplating history, family, and today’s America, Dane A. Wisher tells the story of spreading his father’s ashes on the battlefield at Gettysburg National Park and coming to terms with his life and death.

How do you get to know a father — or a man — who defines himself by one single, insurmountable achievement?

Writing for New York magazine, Steve Fishman tells the story of the most extensive face transplant yet performed, including the entire scalp, ears, and eyelids, and the two men involved.

‘My daughter doesn’t have a father, or, she has two fathers, since I don’t know which man her father is. One of her fathers says it’s like Schrödinger’s cat in there.’

After leaving a drag-and-click job at a newspaper to learn carpentry, Nina MacLaughlin takes on her first big solo project: building bookshelves for her father.

Alysia Abbott recalls being raised by her poet father—a single, openly gay man—in the San Francisco of the nineteen-seventies and eighties.

Recently, Roy Wenzl profiled a woman named Kerri Rawson for The Wichita Eagle. Rawson’s life was upended a decade ago, when an FBI agent knocked on her door and informed her that the man she’d always known as a loving father was in fact the BTK serial killer. Wenzl’s piece is a compelling and meticulous portrait of a […]

In Bloomberg Businessweek, Claire Suddath reports that there are only two countries in the world that don’t have some type of legally protected, partially paid leave for working women who just had a baby: Papua New Guinea and the U.S. The result is another big gap between the haves and have-nots: The policies vary widely […]

How burdens and values pass from fathers to sons, and the search for that one true thing.

Mark Warren wrote in Esquire about how, at age 30, he finally experienced a father’s love through Dieter, his father-in-law.

Stephen Rodrick | The Magical Stranger | 2014 | 11 minutes (2,779 words) Below is the first chapter from The Magical Stranger, Stephen Rodrick’s memoir about his father, squadron commander and Navy pilot Peter Rodrick. Our thanks to Rodrick for sharing it with the Longreads community.

[Not single-page] A difficult life with a father remembered through his favorite words and phrases: He never once found comfortable shoes, and when he’d come home from the plant after a double overtime, the searing pain in his feet would have him whimpering like a child. Swornin’ to goodness! was his pain expression. Was it […]