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My Father's Ghost
The Nebula Award-winning author chronicles her relationship with her father during the last seventeen years of his life, tracing the changing dynamics of a parent-child relationship transformed by the aging process. 17,500 first printing.
- GenresMemoir
304 pages, Hardcover
First published September 30, 2002
18 people want to read
About the author
Suzy McKee Charnas
76 books108 followersSuzy McKee Charnas, a native New Yorker raised and educated in Manhattan, surfaced as an author with WALK TO THE END OF THE WORLD (1974), a no-punches-pulled feminist SF novel and Campbell award finalist. The three further books that sprang from WALK (comprising a futurist, feminist epic about how people make history and create myth) closed in 1999 with THE CONQUEROR’S CHILD, a Tiptree winner (as is the series in its entirety).
Meanwhile, she taught for two years in Nigeria with the Peace Corps, married, and moved to New Mexico, where she has lived, taught, and written fiction and non-fiction for forty five years. She teaches SF from time to time, and travels every year to genre conventions around the country and (occasionally) around the world.
Her varied SF and fantasy works have also won the Hugo award, the Nebula award, the Gigamesh Award (Spain), and the Mythopoeic award for Young-Adult fantasy. A play based on her novel THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY has been staged on both coasts. STAGESTRUCK VAMPIRES (Tachyon Books) collects her best short fiction, plus essays on writing feminist SF and on seeing her play script first become a professionally staged drama in San Francisco. Currently, she’s working at getting all of her work out in e-book, audio, and other formats, and moving several decades’ worth of manuscripts, correspondence, etc. out of a slightly leaky garage and sent off to be archived at the University of Oregon Special Collections. She has two cats and a gentleman boarder (also a cat), good friends and colleagues, ideas for new work, and travel plans for the future.
Meanwhile, she taught for two years in Nigeria with the Peace Corps, married, and moved to New Mexico, where she has lived, taught, and written fiction and non-fiction for forty five years. She teaches SF from time to time, and travels every year to genre conventions around the country and (occasionally) around the world.
Her varied SF and fantasy works have also won the Hugo award, the Nebula award, the Gigamesh Award (Spain), and the Mythopoeic award for Young-Adult fantasy. A play based on her novel THE VAMPIRE TAPESTRY has been staged on both coasts. STAGESTRUCK VAMPIRES (Tachyon Books) collects her best short fiction, plus essays on writing feminist SF and on seeing her play script first become a professionally staged drama in San Francisco. Currently, she’s working at getting all of her work out in e-book, audio, and other formats, and moving several decades’ worth of manuscripts, correspondence, etc. out of a slightly leaky garage and sent off to be archived at the University of Oregon Special Collections. She has two cats and a gentleman boarder (also a cat), good friends and colleagues, ideas for new work, and travel plans for the future.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 7, 2009
A very honest and often funny account of being the grown-up child of an aging stranger-dad. I like the elderly; I found this book on a shelf at work; I now like my job.
April 16, 2024
Fascinating story of an author’s artistic estranged dad and how she took care of him and tried to make connections with him in the last years of his,life. Lots of drama but lots of lessons for anyone trying to connect with an older parent.
January 16, 2013
When Suzy McKee Charnas was eight years-old her father, Robin McKee, left her, her mother and sister to dedicate his life to being an artist. He was spectacularly unsuccessful. Contact with his children was intermittent but never broken. Several years later realizing that Robin was living a meager existence in Manhatten and had problems caring for himself as he entered old age, Charnas invites him to live with her and her husband in New Mexico. Surprisingly he accepts.
Charnas writes eloquently and honestly of life with a father that in many ways was a stranger to her. Robin was taciturn, difficult and not prone to sentimentality, but there were moments when he and Suzy connected in ways she had never imagined possible.
The second section of this memoir covers the last 3 years of Robin's life. His health has declined to such a degree that Charnas must find a nursing home for him. After a long search she finds an affordable place with a caring staff. The transition for both father and daughter is difficult, but even here, in the unlikeliest of places, there is a ray of light and hope no one could have imagined. Truth really is stranger than fiction.
I have long been an admirer of Charnas's science fiction and fantasy work. Here her novelist's eye paints a mesmerizing portrait of herself, her father and other fascinating characters in her life. I sat down one afternoon to read a few chapters and found myself so absorbed in this true and complex story that I literally could not put it down. It is truly a remarkable work.
Charnas writes eloquently and honestly of life with a father that in many ways was a stranger to her. Robin was taciturn, difficult and not prone to sentimentality, but there were moments when he and Suzy connected in ways she had never imagined possible.
The second section of this memoir covers the last 3 years of Robin's life. His health has declined to such a degree that Charnas must find a nursing home for him. After a long search she finds an affordable place with a caring staff. The transition for both father and daughter is difficult, but even here, in the unlikeliest of places, there is a ray of light and hope no one could have imagined. Truth really is stranger than fiction.
I have long been an admirer of Charnas's science fiction and fantasy work. Here her novelist's eye paints a mesmerizing portrait of herself, her father and other fascinating characters in her life. I sat down one afternoon to read a few chapters and found myself so absorbed in this true and complex story that I literally could not put it down. It is truly a remarkable work.
December 17, 2014
WHAT a book this was! When the author invited her estranged, mysterious father to move across the country to live with her and her husband, she had no idea that he'd say yes, or what the reality would be once he arrived with his few art supplies (he had been an artist) and the cache of 40 volumes of diary he'd kept for most of his adult life, the "history" his daughter wasn't sure she could face but did.
But mostly it's a story of all those years he lived with her (17!). As he and her mother had divorced when she was a child, this was her chance to know him as an adult, a first and last chance to come to terms with who he was. Through his cantankerous, contrary, passive and frustrating presence in the house next door over nearly two decades, she gleaned little bits of knowledge of the 'real' person behind the fantasy father who had left her so many years before. Then came the need to hand him over to a nursing home, an impossible-seeming wrench for both of them. This is a book about hanging on to someone you love as time slowly strips him of one element of himself after another, and leaves finally the querulous angry child who may be at the core of all of us....
This is also a book that struggles to make sense out of the seemingly senseless shape of a long and perhaps "failed" life, and comes up with a few interesting answers. So...this is probably the best kind of mystery, about finding a key person after a long important absence, and slowly, painfully deciphering his message....
But mostly it's a story of all those years he lived with her (17!). As he and her mother had divorced when she was a child, this was her chance to know him as an adult, a first and last chance to come to terms with who he was. Through his cantankerous, contrary, passive and frustrating presence in the house next door over nearly two decades, she gleaned little bits of knowledge of the 'real' person behind the fantasy father who had left her so many years before. Then came the need to hand him over to a nursing home, an impossible-seeming wrench for both of them. This is a book about hanging on to someone you love as time slowly strips him of one element of himself after another, and leaves finally the querulous angry child who may be at the core of all of us....
This is also a book that struggles to make sense out of the seemingly senseless shape of a long and perhaps "failed" life, and comes up with a few interesting answers. So...this is probably the best kind of mystery, about finding a key person after a long important absence, and slowly, painfully deciphering his message....
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews