A Writer's Tribute to Her Father

13.  Personal History.: My Father's Stack of Books, by Kathryn Schulz.  Published in The New Yorker, March 18, 2019. 

Illustration by Rose Wong

"My father had a ravenous love of books, and his always had a devoured look to them." 

The illustration alone invites you to read this beautiful essay.  Kathryn Schulz is one of my favorite New Yorker writers and this essay reveals why.  I sent the link to this piece to two friends, both fathers and both readers and book lovers, on Father's Day 2019.

I love this personal essay for many reasons.  But, for me, the crème de la crème is a paragraph toward the end that reads like a thing of beauty.  Schulz writes:

In a kinder world—one where my father’s childhood had been less desperate, his fear of financial instability less acute, his sense of the options available to him less constrained—I suspect that he would have grown up to be a professor, like my sister, or a writer, like me. As it was, he derived endless vicarious pleasure from his daughters’ work. Although he seemed to embody the ideal of the self-made man, my father was not terribly rah-rah about the bootstrap fantasy of the American Dream; he was too aware of how tenuous his trajectory had been, how easily his good life could have gone badly instead, how many helping hands and lucky breaks and second chances he had had along the way. Still, given his particular bent, having a daughter who got paid to read books was perhaps the consummate example of seeing to it that your kids had a better life than your own.

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Also by Kathryn Schulz and published in The New Yorker on July 13, 2015, Annals of Seismology, The Really Big One.   

She picks apart a West Coast fault piece-by-piece, step-by-step and informs us of something that most Americans have never thought about and never knew about.