num_pages: 283
description: This heartfelt gay memoir about an adult son uncovering his father’s secrets is “a cross between Dickens’s David Copperfield , Rousseau’s Confessions , and the new pornography” (Donald Windham). When his father died, J. R. Ackerley was shocked to discover that he had led a secret life. And after Ackerley himself died, he left a surprise of his own—this coolly considered, unsparingly honest account of his quest to find out the whole truth about the man who had always eluded him in life. But Ackerley’s pursuit of his father is also an exploration of the self—making My Father and Myself a pioneering record, at once sexually explicit and emotionally charged, of life as a gay man. This witty, sorrowful, and beautiful book is a classic of twentieth-century memoir.
language: English
title: My Father and Myself
titlecomplete: My Father and Myself
genres: British Literature, LGBT, Autobiography, Gay, Biography Memoir, Biography, 20th Century, Memoir, Nonfiction, Queer
ratings_count: 685
publisher: NYRB Classics