Important Things That Dont Matter: A Novel
by David Amsden
Category: Fiction

A provocative, moving, darkly funny portrait of family and divorce, a boy and his father, the eighties and nineties, and sex and intimacy issues that raises vital questions about a generation just now reaching adulthood. Important Things that Don't Matter The truth is, I really have no idea how everything I'm about to tell you happened, or why really -- how Dad of all people started diluting my thoughts lately, tugging at certain moments, making cameo appearances at the most inopportune times. Like I'm in a bar, just trying to have a beer, and all of a sudden I'm seven again, in that bar with Dad. A girl reaches over and puts her hand up into my hair, and I just want her to stop, to get off, to go away -- you guessed it, there's Dad, somewhere. Maybe a psychoanalyst would say it was the divorce, or Dad and the cocaine, and that I was too young then, but that I'm twenty now, and that people are prone to oppress and repress and suppress and regress and digress -- maybe he'd tell you it's part of "a larger syndrome." But I'm not sure people like that quite know what they're saying. Trust me. I've been to them. So Dad's around lately. That's it. And I want to tell you things, throw fragments your way that I barely understand. Because it's just funny, flat out, the way someone you don't even know can get up in your face, tweak things that should be so ordinary. Or I think it's funny. Maybe you will too. Maybe you'll laugh. Maybe you won't believe a word. Maybe you'll wish you had my number so we could go out, share things. Maybe you'll know something I don't, and can tell me. Maybe -- I'm just hung up on him, on Dad, on parents in general. So many of them, it seems, act like such children these days. Some of us are adults now, and I can't help but wonder: What's going to happen?