British Authors - 20th Century - Literary Biography, Fathers - Biography, Scottish Authors - Biography, Sons & Daughters - Biography

A Lie about My Father

Name: A Lie about My Father
Author: John Burnside
ISBN: 9780224074872

by John Burnside

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Overview

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 this astonishing memoir 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.

About the Author, John Burnside

JOHN BURNSIDE has published five works of fiction and nine collections of poetry, including The Asylum Dance, which won the 2001 Whitbread Poetry Award.