Not All Dads Are Good Dads

Now that Father’s Day has passed, can we be honest with each other? Not all dads, truth be told, are Good Dads. Not all dads are tweetable, or postable. Some are even Bad Dads. For Lit Hub, Andrew Thurman writes about a literary genre he’s particularly invested in: the Bad Dad Memoir, typically written by the offspring of said Bad Dads. Thurman writes, “We’ll never have the satisfaction of seeing Isaac turn his family skills of ingenuity, invention, and creativity back on Abraham, but seeing a Bad Dad author bring a book to fruition is, in part, to watch an incompetent underdog come to exert some mastery over their situation; the idiot child becomes an intelligent adult capable of telling their own story. It’s not exactly triumphant, but it’s something.” We’ll take it.

is a staff writer for The Millions. Born and raised in New York, she now lives in the Midwest, where she is a PhD student in American literature.