Our Father Who Wasn't There

I have now finished the book Our Father Who Wasn't There, by David Carlin. I am a little disappointed, not because it's not a good book, but because it was just not quite what I was expecting. After the paragraph I posted here, much of the rest of the book was not so relevant to anything I've experienced. Carlin was one of four boys for starters, and my family was all girls, and I think that any sort of "issues" involved are quite different when you lose a parent of the same sex, rather than the opposite one. Not that that is really a feature of this book. The big difference is that Carlin's father actually committed suicide, and much of the rest of the book is the story of the author looking for clues as to why. So he digs up old medical files, visits old towns his father lived in, discovers his father was gang-raped in the Navy (not what I was expecting to read!), explores various psychiatric treatments of the time that his father underwent, and so it goes on. What he is mostly trying to do is construct a portrait of his own father. I knew that was going to be the case from the book blurb, but one review on the book jacket also claimed the book "fully illuminates the experience of fatherlessness", which is what I was more interested in - but I didn't find that so much.

I don't know whether I've ever even said as much on this blog, but my own father died after a road accident. He was tall, athletic, from what I can gather quite "masculine", happy-go-lucky and not prone to psychologising about life. Those who knew him said he was the most "undieable" person you could meet. All of which makes him quite different to the father, and so to most of the story, of this book. If I have my own streak of melancholy that comes predominantly from my mother's family, but even in that vast Scottish clan actual depression is mercifully absent (I have connections to the Scottish poet Robert Burns - you can blame it on that, though he was a rogue).

However, this book is actually perhaps quite an interesting exploration of depression, and even its various treatments, because the author has had moments of his own struggle with that black dog and treats the subject well (from what I can observe as an outsider). It's basic cognitive-behaviour therapy these days, but at one point Carlin writes on this idea of "grooves in your brain", which a psychologist pointed out to me once, and has a mock conversation with his father, after wondering if things would have been different if his father was born in a later time. I'll quote a little bit that made me smile:

According to neuroscientists, we all wear neuronal grooves in our brains as familiar thought associations flow from A to B to C. For those in mental trouble, like Brian, the sheep tracks are negative, destructive ones: deep gutters of despair eroding away the healthy topsoil. I am determined to pursue this clumsy agricultural metaphor, because this is the way I would explain it to Brian [Brian, the father, studied agriculture, but also psychology, and it would appear that the studying of psychology was quite destructive for him]: It's like your brain is a paddock, Dad - and, by the way, have you noticed that your name is only a slip of the typing fingers away from being 'Brain', which is kind of ironic, don't you think? Anyway, think of your brain as a paddock with these sheep tracks, and you can actually find new ways to get across the paddock. You can retrain those sheep, which are your thoughts, remember, to climb out of their well-worn paths and walk in different directions, from A to H and back to A again, so then they say 'Aha!' in sheep language. And you would feel happier, that's the point.

That was of some interest because you also, apparently, get grooves in your brain in how you respond to circumstances. And so one of the potential problems of facing significant trauma as a child is that you reacted to it in a "childlike" manner, but that begins a groove, and you might have to retrain yourself to respond differently later.

All up I liked this book as a memoir, and I am interested in memoir writing, it just wasn't one all that close to my own heart. So I'll have to keep looking for that book about a girl who had two sisters whose father died when she was four after a road accident.