The Truth About Unringing Phones: Essays on Yearning

by Lara Lillibridge

242 pages, Paperback

Published March 5, 2024

About the author

Lara Lillibridge sings off-beat and dances off-key. She writes a lot, and sometimes even likes how it turns out.

She is the author of two memoirs, Girlish: Growing Up in a Lesbian Home, Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards Finalist (Skyhorse Publishing, 2018) and Mama, Mama, Only Mama (Skyhorse Publishing, 2019).

Lara Lillibridge is a graduate of West Virginia Wesleyan College’s MFA program in Creative Nonfiction. In 2016 she won Slippery Elm Literary Journal’s Prose Contest, and The American Literary Review's Contest in Nonfiction. She also was a finalist in both Black Warrior Review’s Nonfiction Contest and DisQuiet’s Literary Prize in Creative Nonfiction. She has had essays published in Pure Slush Vol. 11, Vandalia, and Polychrome Ink; on the web at Hippocampus, Crab Fat Magazine, Luna Luna, Huffington Post, The Feminist Wire, Airplane Reading, Thirteen Ways to Tell a Story, Weirderary, and Brain, Child magazine's Brain, Mother blog. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Reviews

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wanting to support this press, but not knowing which book of theirs I wanted to read, I filled out an online form for a 'blind date.' Their sending this particular book had to be based on my answer about a perfect evening being one of (obsessively) discussing (obsessive) minutiae with a fellow introvert. (I’m paraphrasing.) And that’s what Lillibridge does to the relationship she had (and tried to have) with the very problematic father she loved unreasonably and beyond reason.

Her memoir is also a perfect example of why a writer not only writes—because words are what she has: “Every night I clenched my teeth as I slept. My dreams were filled with words like poems, a constant narration describing things like the shade of a certain purple flower”—but also why she publishes, even if the subject matter is extremely personal. And even if, or perhaps especially because, her father was a public figure, and seen differently by others.

She wants to be seen too and understood, and perhaps, as someone who “will always be weird inside” (to quote an Everclear lyric that’s always stood out for me and is appropriately enough from their song, 'Father of Mine') to be seen as not unusual. In the last line of her acknowledgments, she thanks “all the people who told [her] that they, too, struggle with their fathers.”

[Ryan Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s lovely and so educating❤️

[Ruth Morhard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful written essays on the author's lifelong yearning for a distant, eccentric, father, written in fragments as if to illustrate the fragmented nature of their relationship. Lara Lillibridge deserves attention as one of our most powerful, sensitive writers. This book is a lovely companion to her earlier book, "Girlish," about her life with her two moms. Highly recommended.

[Michele Dawson Haber]

I was unexpectedly captivated by Lara Lillibridge's essay collection about her lifetime of yearning for a father who didn't--not in my eyes, anyway--deserve her devotion. Although it was morbidly fascinating to witness through Lara's eyes the ways in which her father sprinkled small moments of kindness and parental encouragement amidst his more frequent inappropriate, deplorable, and selfish behavior--his character wasn't really the point. What the author succeeded in conveying was the normalcy of what, on its face, doesn't seem rational: that no matter how old we get, and no matter how much we understand their faults, we still hold on to an inexplicable need for our parents to show us they care, that they're proud of us, and that we matter. Witnessing Lara move slowly forward through the emotional landmines of this relationship, I hoped she would find her way to peace. I had to get to the end, I had to find out if she succeeded--there was no chance I was going to put this book down! And neither will anyone else who starts it. Brilliantly written in a variety of experimental, fragmentary chapters (my favorite of which was Fear of Spiders), The Truth About Unringing Phones is an illuminating and relatable memoir. I recommend it without reservation.

[Carole Duff · Rating 5 out of 5]

In 2018, Lara Lillibridge published Girlish, a memoir about her childhood through the lens of her mother’s lesbian relationship. Now Lillibridge turns the lens on her absent, neglectful, sex addicted father. Weaving essays and vignettes, the author tells a story of unreciprocated, uncomfortable love, self-preservation and letting go. How much do you owe a father who often doesn’t answer your calls and whose stepchildren from his seventh marriage only call when he needs money? A searing journey toward grace and acceptance.

[Amy Eaton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Told in fragments, Lillibridge’s recollections of their father are wrenching, funny, relatable, and sometimes bewildering and mind boggling. It’s a portrait on steroids of life for GenX kids. Beyond the typical adult ignoring and oblivion and latchkey life most Gen Xers can relate to, Lillibridge’s experience of a father so distant in emotion and in actual miles gave new meaning to having an absent father.

[Estelle Erasmus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this compelling collection of essays in one sitting. In vivid language, dazzling dialogue, and lush description the author sets up scenes and uses artifacts showing the fragmented nature of her relationship with her father and her evolution to self-awareness as she realizes who and what she needs to leave behind to heal her own broken parts and rediscover her true value.