A well-known author once told Pulitzer Prize-winner Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; Telegraph Avenue), "You can write books or you can have kids…you lose a book for every child." Yet Chabon, father of four, argues that books, unlike children, don't love you back. So begins this literary ode to parenting in which the author admires his son Abe's rare gift for doing things with panache but struggles to understand his love for fashion, stumbles over bedtime reading, and ponders how to teach his son how to treat the women in his life even as he explores his own foibles and failures in this regard. As parenting is likely to lead to self-reflection, Chabon further examines his own childhood through the looking glass, contemplating his decision not to follow in his father's footsteps and become a doctor. In the last section, Chabon writes about visiting his father, who is hospitalized for a possibly fatal infection, meditating on his own relationship with Dad. (From Publishers Weekly Reviews)
In his memoir Look Me in the Eye (2007), Robison wrote about his own Asperger's syndrome—he was diagnosed with the form of autism when he was 40 years old. Here he asks the question: How does a man who lacks a sense of empathy and an ability to read nonverbal cues learn to be a father? And how does a man with Asperger's learn to recognize the same symptoms in his own child? (A key element in the book is Robison's son's own diagnosis, and Robison's reaction to his having missed seeing the signs for as long as he had.) In many ways, this is a traditional father-and-son memoir, but the added element of Asperger's gives the story a stronger emotional core: when Robison and his wife separated, for example, he realized he had been misreading a lot of what had been going on between them. It's a story of a man learning to be a parent, yes, but it's also—and perhaps more importantly—the story of a man discovering, as an adult, who he really is. (From Booklist Reviews)
These two books explore the complex and widely varying relationships shared between a father and child. Pops reflects on the author's relationship with his father and his own four children. Raising Cubby describes the challenges and wild adventures this father and son shared.
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