num_pages: 336
description: 
  My father told lies all his life and, because I knew no better, I repeated them. Lies about everything, great and small, were the very fabric of my world.

  

  
The lie in the title of astonishing memoir Lie About My Father is born of shame. Traveling around upstate New York in the nineties, John Burnside can't bear to share the truth about his father during a casual conversation with a hitchhiker. He covers his uneasiness with a lie. It felt natural to do so.His father, abandoned as a baby on a stranger's doorstep, created a masterful web of deceit to erase this unbearable fact. John, even as a child, represented everything that was wrong with the world and became the recipient of his father's selfhatred in the form of enraged violence, and worse, petty, cruel belittlement. Growing up in the tough working-class neighborhoods of Scotland and later England, John learned to lie back to his father and, later, about his father.
language: English
title: A Lie About My Father: A Memoir
titlecomplete: A Lie About My Father: A Memoir
genres: British Literature, Autobiography, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, Memoir
ratings_count: 276
places: New York City, New York, Scotland, England
awards: awardedAt: 1230796800000
name: Prix Littéraire Européen - Madeleine Zepter, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Saltire Society Literary Award
category: Scottish Book of the Year, awardedAt: 1293868800000
name: Corine Internationaler Buchpreis
category: Belletristik
publisher: Graywolf Press