OCTOBER 2016 - AudioFile
George Newborn expertly delivers Forhan’s memoir. His voice for the author reflects the various stages of his life, finding meaning in memories that range from childhood to adulthood. As Forhan shares key moments of his life, he focuses in particular on his father’s suicide while Forhan was still young. The premise of the memoir suggests a somber experience for the listener, but Newborn’s performance is filled with both light and dark textures as Forhan examines his family’s unspoken rules of conduct about what is discussed openly and what is left unsaid, and what may have ultimately led Forhan’s father to make the choices he did. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
07/18/2016
A father's suicide prompts his son to break the silences in his family's history in this luminous memoir. Pushcart Prize–winning poet Forhan (Black Leapt In) was 13 in 1973 when his father committed suicide, leaving behind a wife and eight children but no suicide note. Forhan pieces together the traumatic childhoods of his parents, both of whom were abandoned by their fathers and grew up impoverished and insecure in the Great Depression; the experience, he conjectures, pushed his father into a taciturn, emotionally repressed, career-oriented style of manhood that starved his soul and prevented him from getting appropriate care for his scarred psyche. Much of the book is Forhan's vivid recreation of his suburban Seattle childhood, rich in details of kid culture; the small humiliations experienced by a reserved, inward boy; and the wracking tensions he felt from his parents' marriage. He also tells of his feckless adolescence and attempt at a career in broadcast journalism before becoming a poet. Forhan's characterization of his father's plight as an inability to talk about feelings sometimes feels strained—his father clearly suffered from a serious mental illness—but he movingly conveys the quiet, painful enigmas that people can pose to their families. Agent: Bill Clegg, Clegg Agency. (June)
From the Publisher
"My Father Before Me is an exquisite example of the power of honesty. In this wonderful memoir, Chris Forhan shows that the best way to counter a legacy of mystery and deception is with compassion and truth.”—Jeannette Walls, bestselling author of The Glass Castle
“My Father Before Me is the compelling account of a father’s suicide and its devastating after-effects. Chris Forhan sets out to answer the questions that family members inevitably ask in the wake of this tragedy: What made him do it? Was it something I did or said? Was it something I didn’t say? Was there anything any of us could have done to save him? From the dramatic act itself to the reverberations felt for decades, Chris Forhan looks without flinching at himself and his father and bravely considers the way he is and is not his father’s son. On any single page of this remarkable memoir there are more honest insights than in entire books on the same subject.”—Larry Watson, author of Montana 1948
"A son’s relationship with his father is nearly always fraught, but Chris Forhan’s is especially compelling: at 14, abandoned by his father’s suicide, Chris was old enough to have been shaped by his father, but still too young to understand how. By the time he’s 44—the same age his father reached—Chris begins to reassess, taking a fiercely honest look at himself and his family in the hope that he might change. Piercing and compassionate, My Father Before Me offers a brilliant glimpse into the seemingly impossible but urgently human task of growing out of the selves we’ve become and into the selves we need to be."—Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
“Chris Forhan has long been one of my favorite poets, and I was thrilled to hear that he'd written a memoir. It is everything I imagined it to be. It's that rare thing—a true memoir, a real re-imagining of a self and an experience. What he has to say here about childhood and adulthood, choosing to live and choosing to die, who we are as children and who we are as parents is timeless and universal in its necessity. The sheer energy of this material is riveting, and the utter intensity of it is its most inescapable quality.”—Laura Kasischke, author of the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Space, In Chains
“Poignant….affecting….It’s difficult to lose a parent, let alone write about the loss. Forhan describes his family’s healing and acceptance with warmth, humor, and an admirable lack of bitterness.”—Kirkus Reviews
"Forhan is a poet...and this introspective, precisely written memoir shows it.. In the tradition of Geoffrey Wolff...a powerful family story."—Booklist
"A truly emotionally gripping saga. I fell fast under the spell of this new struggling, emotional, and extremely honest friend. My Father Before Me is set apart by the special attributes of the very best books of its kind—characters one seems never to have encountered previously on the page and a narrator who attaches himself to our own memories and, moreover to our hearts and feelings. This belongs on the special shelves we keep for the books we cannot quite forget."—George Hodgman, author of the New York Times bestseller Betttyville
“Chris Forhan’s aching, lyrical memoir excavates both a lost father and a lost era in American history....Forhan writes with grace and intelligence....By bringing in the voices of his siblings and mother, he fleshes out this portrait of a haunted and wounded man, adding heft and color to the fragments of memory....[Forhan’s] journey is beautifully and resonantly captured here.”—Bookpage
"Beautifully written."—Seattle Times
“A wonderfully engrossing book. Essential for all parents and children, that is, all people.”—Library Journal STARRED review
"Achingly beautiful...a triumph."—Buffalo News
"There’s great wisdom here. Passages that startle."—New York Journal of Books
Laura Kasischke
Chris Forhan has long been one of my favorite poets, and I was thrilled to hear that he'd written a memoir. It is everything I imagined it to be. It's that rare thing—a true memoir, a real re-imagining of a self and an experience. What he has to say here about childhood and adulthood, choosing to live and choosing to die, who we are as children and who we are as parents is timeless and universal in its necessity. The sheer energy of this material is riveting, and the utter intensity of it is its most inescapable quality.
Nick Flynn
"A son’s relationship with his father is nearly always fraught, but Chris Forhan’s is especially compelling: at 14, abandoned by his father’s suicide, Chris was old enough to have been shaped by his father, but still too young to understand how. By the time he’s 44—the same age his father reached—Chris begins to reassess, taking a fiercely honest look at himself and his family in the hope that he might change. Piercing and compassionate, Nothing You Can Name offers a brilliant glimpse into the seemingly impossible but urgently human task of growing out of the selves we’ve become and into the selves we need to be."
Larry Watson
Nothing You Can Name is the compelling account of a father’s suicide and its devastating after-effects. Chris Forhan sets out to answer the questions that family members inevitably ask in the wake of this tragedy: What made him do it? Was it something I did or said? Was it something I didn’t say? Was there anything any of us could have done to save him? From the dramatic act itself to the reverberations felt for decades, Chris Forhan looks without flinching at himself and his father and bravely considers the way he is and is not his father’s son. On any single page of this remarkable memoir there are more honest insights than in entire books on the same subject.
Library Journal
★ 10/15/2016
Poet and professor (English, Butler Univ.) Forhan was 14 when his father killed himself. His memoir does an extraordinary job of delving deep into his Irish American Catholic family, and his parents' own dysfunctional pasts. Forhan is particularly brilliant when delineating the ways in which we carry on our family histories, no matter how we try not to, and that we can learn from our upbringings, which is essential if we are to make our own lives, and those of our children, not only different but better. VERDICT Essential reading for all parents and children, that is, all people. [See Memoir, 7/18/16; ow.ly/yI6y304zQxw.]—Derek Sanderson (DS)
OCTOBER 2016 - AudioFile
George Newborn expertly delivers Forhan’s memoir. His voice for the author reflects the various stages of his life, finding meaning in memories that range from childhood to adulthood. As Forhan shares key moments of his life, he focuses in particular on his father’s suicide while Forhan was still young. The premise of the memoir suggests a somber experience for the listener, but Newborn’s performance is filled with both light and dark textures as Forhan examines his family’s unspoken rules of conduct about what is discussed openly and what is left unsaid, and what may have ultimately led Forhan’s father to make the choices he did. S.P.C. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2016-03-28
An award-winning poet revisits the suicide of his father. Forhan (English/Butler Univ.; Ransack and Dance, 2013, etc.) was 14 when his middle-age father, Ed, the head of finance for Alaska Lumber and Pulp, went into the carport of the family's home, ran a garden hose from the exhaust pipe of his car to the driver's window, and lay down across the front seat. The author's mother, Ange, discovered her husband the next morning. Forty years later, when Forhan reached the age at which his father died, he realized that his father is only "a scattering of fragments." So he decided to track down anyone who could help him understand why Ed would have chosen, without a word of warning, to abandon his wife and eight children. The resulting memoir is a poignant exploration of Ed's strict Catholic upbringing, his problems with diabetes, and, once he became a father, his increasingly erratic behavior—slipping up at work, staying out all night, incurring gambling debts. The book also charts Forhan's maturity, from his years as a Boy Scout to his early TV news career and growing doubts about Catholicism. The book's main flaw is that Ed often isn't at the center of the story and thus feels at times like a supporting player. These absences, coupled with long digressions on more mundane events—such as the free koi Forhan received from a radio station or the tourist sites his family visited on a trip to Disneyland—dilute the book's power. But there are still many affecting scenes here, especially of the author finding solace in poetry and his discovery that a poem can communicate "a sense of openness, of receptive attention to a life that enchants and baffles." It's difficult to lose a parent, let alone write about the loss. Forhan describes his family's healing and acceptance with warmth, humor, and an admirable lack of bitterness.
