The Bill from My Father: A Memoir (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "I scratch," said my father..." (more)
Key Phrases: polyester jumpsuit, Mount Sinai, New York, Los Angeles (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Cooper, whose Maps to Anywhere won the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award, crafts a brusquely tender elegy to his baffling father, Edward, who died in 2000 (the book's title refers to an itemized bill of expenses incurred from upbringing and mailed from father to son). Edward was a blustery Los Angeles divorce lawyer with a flair for drama in and out of court. Circling from recent to distant past, Cooper recalls his utter bewilderment at his father's ill-advised imbroglios, which included an affair with his father's evangelical nurse and a lawsuit against the phone company. With a sharp scalpel of detail, Cooper dissects his father's stinging dismissals and unceremonious reconciliations with his sole surviving progeny, laboring to slice away a mystique that "ballooned into myth" in Edward's sustained absences. Dear old dad never bothered to read his son's prize-winning work, in which he figures prominently—though it's clear that father and son share a linguistic legerdemain. Stirring yet never saccharine, this memoir excavates a fraught history without once collapsing into cliché. As much as Cooper seeks truth, he finally grows comfortable in the shadowy depths of his father's legacy. "By delving into the riddle of him, I hoped to know his mystery by finer degrees."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Cooper's midlife coming-of-age story was undertaken after a New York editor read his essay about his father and encouraged a book. Dad, a former L.A. attorney specializing in high-profile divorces until retirement at 86, had "glided downtown each weekday morning in a white Cadillac, his fingernails buffed to a high gloss, his briefcase embossed with interlocking letters, ESC, for Edward Samuel Cooper," and thought of his sole surviving son's writing as a hobby. He hoped Bernard would one day abandon teaching freshman composition for a real job but consented to interviews for this book, thereby setting in motion a humorous, wrenching, but never boring exploration of a frustrating father-son relationship. Bernard's deceased brothers had pleased their father by becoming lawyers or private investigators, joining Dad's firm, and being heterosexual. Bernard did none of that and has to come to terms with the philandering, curmudgeonly father he wishes would grant even token approval instead of the itemized, two-million-dollar bill he'd once sent Bernard for his upbringing. And you thought your father was something else! Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (January 31, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743249623
• ISBN-13: 978-0743249621
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #796,263 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bernard Cooper is a genius!, February 2, 2006

By	Deborah A. Lott (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Who needs James Frey making up sensationalistic details and calling it memoir when we have Bernard Cooper whose brilliant writing makes ordinary experience fantastic, who slows down the rush of time that constitutes our everyday lives to find the most poignant, most telling, most-in-danger-of-being-lost-forever moments and, in the telling, renders them sublime? If you want to see what memoir at its best is capable of, read The Bill from My Father. In it, Cooper captures the universal mysteriousness of having parents: how could these people be both so like us, and so completely foreign to us? How could they seem like both the only parents we could possibly have, and as arbitrary as if the stork dropped us by accident on their doorstep? This book is hysterically funny, terribly sad, and heart-achingly beautiful. Bravo.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Wow! Imagine having a father like this one...., February 13, 2006

By	K. Corn "reviewer" (Indianapolis,, IN United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

This book only goes to show that a parent can often seem like a complete stranger, baffling and mysterious. Bernard Cooper's father was a true enigma and it is up to Cooper to try and make some sense out of his very difficult relationship with his father, a man who can be extremely mean and, yes, abusive...but Cooper refuses to give up on him. This is one intense book and I only hope the shadow James Frey (A Million little Pieces) has thrown over the memoir genre doesn't keep people from reading this one.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Everything a Story Should Have, June 21, 2006

By	John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

A story with everything a story should have: memorable characters, a laugh, a tear, and at the end a realization of what it's like to be the last one in your family. This is a memoir, and a tribute to his father.

The story begins with he and his father talking to each other about his father's life, something we all should do before they are gone and we can't talk to them anymore about anything. It ends with, well I'm not going to say that, let's just say that it ends well.

On the whole this is a funny book. Mr. Cooper tells a lot stories about his father, by the time of the book an octogenarian curmudgeon. He would have been a hard father to live with, even impossible, but good to see from the outside where someone else has to be his family.

The title comes from a bill that his father sent to him when he was 28. In it his father was charging him $2 million for services rendered, food, clothing and so on. I wonder if I could get $2 million out of my kid.