My Father, Dancing
My Father, Dancing by Bliss Broyard is a collection of eight stories exploring the intricate relationships between men and women, particularly focusing on the dynamics between fathers and daughters. Published by Knopf in August 1999, this first edition spans 208 pages and is presented in English. The narratives delve into the complexities of familial bonds, portraying fathers as charismatic yet often harmful figures, while their daughters navigate a spectrum of emotions from longing to indifference.
Readers will find that Broyard’s prose is spare and unsentimental, capturing the evolution of daughters from childhood to adulthood. The stories reflect on early lessons learned from fathers, the impact of infidelity, and the struggle to break free from established familial roles. Themes of love, loss, and the search for identity are woven throughout, as the collection examines the profound and sometimes painful awakenings experienced by women in their relationships with their fathers.
Official synopsis Publisher
Eight stories about relationships between men and women–but especially between fathers and daughters–in a beautiful debut from Bliss Broyard.
The fathers in Broyard’s collection are charismatic, seductive, often brilliant men who are large in the world and even larger in the home, irresistible but also harmful, beautiful but not benign. Their daughters veer wildly between naive longing–for attention, for connection, for assurance–and cool indifference. They learn to reflect their fathers’ light, often at the expense of their own.
In spare, unsentimental prose, Broyard captures the passages of daughters, both as young girls and as grown women: the early lessons girls absorb through their fathers–their first male audience–and the secrets girls keep as they test their own desires; the dislocation of discovering, and identifying with, a parent’s infidelity; the struggle to escape from familial roles and the unyielding impulse to re-create them. From the perplexity of first kisses and first love to the fierce, joyless abandon of casual sex; from the equivocal attachments of marriages and families to the pure and inconsolable grief of love and mourning so poignantly depicted in the collection’s title story, the stories in My Father, Dancing chronicle the never-ending dance between fathers and their daughters, and the many awakenings of girls and women.
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