I grew up without a dad, and for the most part, it was great. My parents had sex just once, at a party. When my mom decided to keep me, she told my dad he didn’t need to be part of my life, and while he was very alarmed by the whole situation, he was also relieved.
In elementary school, when for Father’s Day we would make construction paper ties with dorky poems on the back, I would giggle, knowing I would be giving these symbols of masculinity to my mother. She was my beautiful, brave, female father. And she loved me enough for two, even three people.
Was there a small amount of sadness? Sure. But dads also seemed difficult. They yelled in scary low voices; they made you play sports; they didn’t want to talk about relationships or watch “Xena Warrior Princess.” On TV, they were usually depicted as bumbling buffoons who didn’t know their own children’s birthdays but who somehow managed to attract wives of model-level attractiveness. I didn’t feel that I was missing much. Besides, it would have been really hard for us to have a relationship since my parents weren’t even together and we lived in different places. I was probably better off having nothing instead of having a more complicated something.
That is the story I told myself, the most comfortable story. Even to this day, when I attempt to poke this area of myself, I feel almost nothing. The wound is entirely numb, if it ever was a wound at all.
Which is why it is curious that three of my four novels have centered on father-daughter relationships. I mean, any Freudian analyst’s ears would prick. The first time it was brought up in an interview, I panicked and had a full out-of-body experience. Yes, why exactly did I keep writing myself these imaginary fathers? I didn’t know how to answer the question. Fiction was fiction, I told the interviewer, confused and angry that she was bringing up my personal life. But I found the observation alarming because it suggested that the wound, despite its numb exterior, had been doing something. It had produced these novels.
There is another story I could tell about my relationship to my father. He was and is an actor, so even though I didn’t know him, the internet offered many different versions of his headshot. I would see him in movies, in condiment commercials; he had a small role on “Law and Order” once. Who was he, this man who pretended to be so many other men? And why didn’t he love me? Why didn’t he want to know me?
I mean, I would cry about this. I would write absurd melodramatic things in my diary about how I would become a famous writer and make him regret never knowing me. But I was 15, so I also believed the problem of my father was connected to whether or not there was a God, and if there was, why he would let such awful things happen here on Earth. If there was a God, how could the innocent suffer and the wicked walk free? Why was justice only something that could happen in the afterlife? As an adult, I can see that had I been introduced to my actual father in these moments, he would have in no way solved my problem.
There is a unique pain that results from wanting something counterfactual. Whether it’s wanting someone to love you and they don’t, or wanting someone to live and they can’t. It seems wrong that you can want something so much it feels like you could bend iron with your hands, split atoms with your will, yet you can’t change a thing. You can’t make someone love you any more than you can decide to become a tree or learn to talk to bugs. At 15, I would have given my whole soul to be able to do any of the three.
So perhaps it was rational that I would pursue a career in the counterfactual, crafting fictions, making these imaginary fathers for myself. They say you should write what you know, but that is certainly not what I have been doing. I’ve been writing what I yearn for. And what I love most about writing a father and daughter, the dynamic I keep re-creating in my books, especially in “Margo’s Got Money Troubles,” is of a father and a daughter who don’t know if they are doing it right, but choose to show up for each other all the same. And they usually do a pretty bad job, but they are together. They are not alone.
That is the beautiful part to me, that human moment of not being sure what gesture to make or how it will be received, but doing it anyway because doing it wrong will be better than not doing it at all. It takes bravery to love. It takes a willingness to be foolish.
My actual father and I never succeeded in doing this for each other, but we did have a friendship for a while when I was 18. We discovered we both painted. We both loved restoring furniture and going dumpster diving. We had the same favorite Shakespeare play: “The Tempest.” As you can imagine, my father made a spectacular Ariel. For our only Christmas together, he gave me a signed headshot of himself, a gift so weird I was actually speechless. I got him a red sweater that he hated. We never did figure out what gestures to make or how they would be received. But somehow he sired me. He slept with a pretty lady at a party and now an unknown fragment of himself wanders the universe, liking the same plays as him, painting similarly bad paintings. It is wonderful and strange that so little should still result in so much.
I see my husband now fathering our sons and I see everything I actually did miss, but this knowledge causes no pain. If anything I feel pleasure, delight, watching them wrestle, watching them laugh together. I see him teach them what he knows about how to be a good person, how to skip a stone, how to do a single-leg takedown or make a really good egg sandwich. I would have loved having another person in my life, having a father to teach me these things. But being forged as much by my father’s absence as by his genetics gave me a taste for the counterfactual.
I find myself devoted to the fictional: to the things we can’t make true in this life, on this Earth, but still know in our hearts should be. There are no perfect circles on the physical plane, but the geometer is undeterred. He knows somewhere there is a perfect circle. Justice? Freedom? The laws of physics? All of these take place not here, not now, but in some eternal intangible realm. To me, that is what it is to be human: to want what is counterfactual, to love things that never existed. To yearn for what you did not have, and may never find.
Fiction has that power, to bring things into being that are not actually true, not fully real, and to present them before the eye as though they were. And I didn’t want a dad who was some bumbling sitcom character with a hot wife, or who cared only about beer and sports. Culturally, I think we’ve needed to explore toxic masculinity, to critique the patriarchy, and we’ve done that through our art, from sitcoms to novels, but how could I yearn for that?
Oddly, I didn’t really yearn for a perfect dad either. In fact, I didn’t even have an idea of what a perfect dad might be like! What I truly wanted had nothing to do with masculinity or maleness at all: I just wanted a person. Just a person who would sometimes make me an egg sandwich even if it was a little burnt. And I can’t help but feel it was healing for me to understand that and articulate it, to write those egg sandwiches into being, to write male characters who weren’t jokes, but who weren’t heroes either, to tug the platonic realm just a little bit closer to our own.
