Beverley Nichols' melodramatic memoir of growing up with an alcoholic father. It caused a sensation when first published, and may or may not be partly fictionalized.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Horror Story,
By
This review is from: Father Figure (Paperback)
Nichols' father was an alcoholic-this book details the damage that he did to Nichols and his family. Nichols is to be admired for his honesty-he frankly admits that he tried to kill his father several times,escalating to an attempt to cause his death by exposure.Nichols dragged his drunk,unconcious father out into the snow during a winter storm and then went inside to await the results.(His father managed to lurch back into the house and survived.)Frankly,there is an element of humor as Nichols tries harder and harder to kill his dad,but overall this is as depressing as all stories about a drunken parent wind up being.Nichols wound up being an author and an intimate friend to Noel Coward, among others.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
False Father Figure,
This review is from: Father Figure (Paperback)
I have given this work a five-star rating because this work reads beautifully from beginning to end. It, however, really only deserves a four-stating rating, as will be explained below.
One feels totally absorbed in the life of the author as a young boy and young man first frightened and afterward angered by his father's odd and drunken behavior. There is a touch of Proust in the early pages, in particular, about his boyhood and this father. One feels completely captured by the near-Gothic circumstances in which the author finds himself as an adolescent and a grown man as well regarding this scary, scarring, intimidating, homophobic, constantly drunken figure and his constantly victimized, sacrificing mother. The writing and the depictions drawn are superbly psychologically and aesthetically balanced, neither overdramatic and one-sided nor clinical and overly detached. One thinks of how much must have had the author to overcome and reach a summit of maturity where such deep memories and traumas might be tranquilly and elegantly related without the stain of vindictiveness or the threat of endless blame clinging to its pages. However, if one reads the biography of Beverley Nichols by Bryan Connon, the reader will learn that many of the facts and scenes dramatized in this so-called memoir are neither true nor real. For one, Beverley Nichols' father had a great deal more respect for his son than is shown in this niggardly, semi-truthful story regarding him. How ubiquitous and yet how disappointing it is to be duped (once more) by another memoir that is fictionalized beyond integrity or trust for the reader. It is a golden and rounded work of art that manages to stain the page-turning finger of its readers with a green ring. I'd like to think that the author stretched the truth in order to capture the inner truth or inner light, but this is supposed to be a memoir, not poeticized fiction.
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