Amazon.com: Will They Love Me When I Leave? A Weekend Father's Struggle to Stay Close to His Kids (9780399132490): C. W. Smith: Books

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A divorced father who is a noncustodial parent often becomes "Uncle Dad" to his children, writes the author. In this memoir, Smith (Country Music, etc.), who became such a parent in 1979, records the suffering that divorce inflicted on his family. His efforts to keep close fatherly contact with his twins, a son and daughter, are vividly recounted. The children's rocky passage through adolescence, exacerbated by his impotence as an absentee authority figure, resonates. Candid about responsibility for the problems in his marriage and the fallout on the children, Smith eloquently expresses his feelings of failure, loss, guilt and anger, until, finally, he gives voice to a kind of peace he has achieved in his current role as "patriarch in training" for a new family with his new wife.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Hallowell's journal is the perfect summer beach book for those who are either curious or ambivalent about paternal roles. It is a new father's low-key and gracious account of the world he is creating for his children and his consequent coming to terms with his own fatheran effective and deceptively simple narrative of largely prosaic events, with little analytical comment. The epiphanies are nicely expressed as warning incidents, showing, for example, the author's display of anger as a sort of time warp pointing to his father's hardness and lack of communication and his grandfather's detraction of others. While Hallowell's book is an extended Sunday-supplement account of one month spent at a summer home near Cape Cod, Smith's more unsparingly personal and searing chronicle about fatherhood is written from a different anglethat of a painful acceptance of guilt about his creating a "broken home." Its choppy sentences and many ragged time frames reflect an aggrieved sense of loss, as his role changes from Maintainer of Home to that of "Uncle Dad," trying to remain within range of his children as both target and sounding board. The book is not comforting to read, and the title's question implies a doubtful outcome, especially regarding teenagers, but newly divorced fathers will want to read it to avoid the same mistakes and self-deceptions. Both books are recommended for popular parenthood collections. William Abrams, Portland State Univ. Lib., Ore
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

More About the Author

› Visit Amazon's C. W. Smith Page

C.W. Smith (bn 1940) recently received The Lon Tinkle Award for "sustained excellence in a career" from the Texas Institute of Letters. He has published nine novels, a memoir, and a collection of stories, and his 11th book, the novel Steplings, will appear in Fall of 2011. In addition to his published novels and short stories, his nonfiction pieces and journalism have appeared in many magazines and periodicals, including Esquire, Texas Monthly, and many others. He is a former Dobie-Paisano Fellow at the University of Texas and a two-time grantee of National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships in creative writing. He belongs to PEN, the Author's Guild, the Writer's Guild of America, West (emeritus), and The Texas Institute of Letters. He's a kayak fanatic and a bicycling enthusiast who lives in Dallas with his wife, Marcia. He has one old dog, two grown children, 3 growing grandkids. He was once a jazz tenor player and still runs some riffs in his sleep.

More information at http://cwsmiththeauthor.com and at http://facebook.com/CWSmiththeauthor
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.W._Smith