Released November 1989 (Viking) * 240 pages * ISBN 10: 0670829390
Louie Anderson is an American comedian who uses his dysfunctional childhood as fodder for his
This memoir (he has written several) is a series of letters that Anderson wrote to his father nine years after his father’s death. In his letters Anderson asks the questions that many ACOAs are left with about their addicted parents:
- Did you love me?
- Why did you drink?
- How could I be less important to you than the bottle?
- What made you this way?
- Why did Mom/Dad continue to love you?
- Why don’t we ever talk about it
Anderson chronicles his search for answers in these letters as he remembers incidents from his childhood, deals with network executives who just don’t get it, and asks the rest of his family how they saw family life with their father.
pg. 18 (Network executives want to tone down the characters in a show Anderson is pitching about his family):
They said they wanted to soften it a little. I would have like to. That would have been nice growing up. If you could adjust your family like a television screen, turning the contrast and volume buttons at will. Your contrast and volume buttons were broken. Or stuck, stuck on high.
pg. 69
Mine is a private journey, a selfish one that is full of much more pain than I realized at the start. When I set out several months ago to discover what internal battles caused you to drink, I didn’t understand that I’d also have to take an equally hard look at myself. It hurts, Dad, it hurts a lot. But I’m in too deep to turn back.
I loved this book and cried all the way through it, yet in the morning I woke up with a new resolve to start asking my Dad about his childhood and life before it is too late.
The book is easy to read and Anderson is incredibly honest with himself and, by extension, the reader. The letters are short and the book lends itself to reading a letter or two at a time which may be all that some readers can handle depending on the memories that are triggered.
As memoir formats go, this is an excellent example of one done in letter format. Sometimes when you are stuck, it’s helpful to write a letter you’ll never send.
If the book has any drawbacks, it is that it is very specific to Anderson’s family situation, which is the function of a memoir (of course). This is not a self-help book, but it is insight into how another ACOA has lived and chosen to heal his relationship with his father, even after death.
