A Lie About My Father

A powerful, clear-eyed account of a father's cruelty and a son's survival

“John Burnside has written a brilliant, visceral memoir, balancing painful beauty with dark comedy. A writer of equal parts fierceness and delicacy, at times seemingly bewildered by the forms wreckage can take in this life, bewildered by the costs inherent in the seemingly simple act of telling stories, bewildered by the poetry coming out of his pen. A Lie About My Father shimmers with understated transcendence—a hell of a read.” —Nick Flynn

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 self-hatred in the form of enraged violence, and worse, petty, cruel belittlement. Growing up in tough working-class neighborhoods of Scotland and later England, John learned to lie back to his father, and later, about his father.

“It is cause for wonder that John Burnside could be the subject and object of so much sheer brutality and emerge to describe it with such nuanced lyricism. This book marks the triumph of the heart and mind over the intimate cruelty and despair of a dark childhood and the violent nullity of a wasted youth. It is unbearably upsetting, but also unbearably beautiful, written in the very thickness of inspiration, and full of strange wisdom.” —Andrew Solomon

“John Burnside goes at memoir with a poet’s sure associative instincts and a deep—and humbling—sense of how loss confronted can become an appetite for making art. A profound self-harrowing, A Lie About My Father is also a wincingly accurate portrait of a generation even more lost than Hemingway’s.” —Sven Birkerts