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Life Writing
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Writing Fathers: Auto/biography and

Unfulfilled Vocation in Sara Suleri
Goodyear's Boys Will be Boys and Hanif
Kureishi's My Ear at His Heart
Roco G. Davis
Published online: 15 Oct 2009.

To cite this article: Roco G. Davis (2009) Writing Fathers: Auto/biography and Unfulfilled Vocation
in Sara Suleri Goodyear's Boys Will be Boys and Hanif Kureishi's My Ear at His Heart , Life Writing,
6:2, 229-241, DOI: 10.1080/14484520902931016
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14484520902931016

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Life Writing

VOLUME 6

NUMBER 2

(AUGUST 2009)

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Writing Fathers: Auto/

biography and Unfulfilled
Vocation in Sara Suleri
Goodyears Boys Will be Boys
and Hanif Kureishis My Ear
at His Heart
Roco G. Davis

This paper analyzes Sara Suleri Goodyears Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughters Elegy
and Hanif Kureishis My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father, in the context of
current scholarship on relational auto/biography, specifically criticism on
narratives of filiation, to explore the ways writers engage their fathers stories.
The texts share certain characteristics: Both are written after the fathers death
by biracial English/Pakistani children who are themselves important writers;
textual evidence attests to the authors awareness of a responsibility to
complete their fathers unfulfilled dream of literary publication; the emphasis
in each of the subtitles of the idea of filiation shows this relationship as the
impulse behind the writing of the text. By engaging their fathers lives and their
fathers texts in an auto/biographical project that completes the fathers dream
of writing and being published, both writers signal their awareness of their moral
obligation to do so precisely because it was their fathers who molded them into
writers. We perceive a profound connection between the nature of the project,
the specific form of the auto/biographical act, and the identity of the author as
both child and writer.
Keywords narratives of filiation; Sara Suleri Goodyear; Hanif Kureishi; relational
autobiography

One of the most consequential insights in auto/biography theory in the last two
decades has been that identity*/for both men and women*/is essentially
relational, defined and represented intersubjectively.1 Relational approaches
to life writing have complicated notions of self-representation by privileging the
intersubjective over the individual, invalidating the notion of the autonomous
self*/the idea that one alone defines him/herself*/traditional to Western
theories of life writing. Recent studies demonstrate how the first person in
ISSN 1448-4528 print/1751-2964 online/09/020229-13
# 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/14484520902931016

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autobiography is, as Paul John Eakin argues in How Our Lives Become Stories,
truly plural in its origins and subsequent formation, as it addresses the extent
to which the self is defined by*/and lives in terms of*/its relations with others
(43).2 These critical perspectives on life writing have also noted how the
relational configuration of autobiography even controls the shape of the text,
leading to originative formal choices. The writing subject therefore views and
inscribes his or her story from the prism of intersecting lives. Susanna Egan,
defining her eponymous operative term, mirror talk, argues that this process
begins
as the encounter of two lives in which the biographer is also an autobiographer.
Very commonly, the (auto)biographer is the child or partner of the biographical
subject, a relationship in which (auto)biographical identity is significantly shaped
by the processes of exploratory mirroring. (7)3

Indeed, the renewed aesthetic experience of these auto/biographies stems

precisely from the tension created by this complex dialogue, the performance of
intersubjectivity, which locates the narrating subject most often in the context
of a family or community.
Eakin considers the most common form of the relational life as the selfs story
viewed through the lens of its relation with some key other person, sometimes a
sibling, friend, or lover; but most often a parent*/we might call such an
individual the proximate other to signify the intimate tie to the relational
autobiographer (86). In some cases, the writer will present the biography of the
other as constitutive of his or her own life writing exercise, to the extent of
writing the autobiography of that other. When this happens, the narrator needs
to establish the authority of his or her experience, for rhetorical reasons, based
primarily on the existence and validity of the autobiographical pact. The role of
the writer in relation to that of the subject is also noteworthy. For the story of
the self is not ancillary to the story of the other, and because identity is
conceived as relational in these cases, these narratives defy the boundaries we
try to establish between genres (Eakin 58). One of the most common forms of
relational lives involves writing about fathers, as several recent critical studies
by G. Thomas Couser, David Parker, Roger Porter, and C. Martin Redman have
shown, to the point that we may consider this a distinct sub-genre of
autobiography, although the critics differ on a name for the form. Redman, for
instance, calls the sub-genre the Sons Book of the Father (129), Parker uses the
term intergenerational autobiography (138), while Couser prefers Narratives
of Filiation, a phrase he thoughtfully nuances in the discussion (135), and which
I employ in this discussion. He explains that the term filiation acquires a double
meaning in the context of writing about parents:
First, it refers to the condition or fact of being the child [not necessarily the son,
though the root is the Latin filius, son] of a particular parent (not necessarily a
father); second, in law, it refers to judicial determination of paternity
(American Heritage Dictionary). By calling the texts in question narratives of
filiation, rather than merely memoirs of fathers, I seek to highlight their

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relationality, their rootedness in a sense of entitlement and their intent to enact

some kind of engagement with the father, whether living or dead. (Couser Genre
Matters 135)

Cousers second point describes the project of most current parent-child auto/
biographical narratives. Daughters and sons often write about their fathers in an
attempt to discover or learn about a person who was either largely physically or
psychologically absent or whose presence was so overwhelming that the
autobiographical act becomes an attempt to control the influence of that person
on the authors life. This project inspires us to think about the processes that
govern forms of life writing, particularly those that stress the relational
component. This essay analyzes Sara Suleri Goodyears Boys Will Be Boys:
A Daughters Elegy and Hanif Kureishis My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father,
to explore the ways writers engage their fathers stories. The texts share certain
notable characteristics: Both are written after the fathers death by biracial
English/Pakistani children who are themselves important writers; textual
evidence attests to the authors awareness of a responsibility to complete their
fathers unfulfilled dream of literary publication; the emphasis in each of the
subtitles of the idea of filiation (A Daughters Elegy and Reading My Father)
shows this relationship as the impulse behind the writing of the text.
Redman suggests that the child writing the father ultimately writes him/
herself and that writing the father effectuates the childs process of self-identity
and representation (129). Interestingly, both Goodyears and Kureishis texts
grow from specific personal autobiographical projects. Goodyear had published
Meatless Days (as Sara Suleri), an elegy to her mother and sister, in 1987. As she
narrates the character and experiences of her highly singular family, she notes
her fathers dream of writing an autobiography entitled Boys Will be Boys, and
expresses her regret that he never wrote it (184). Knowing Suleris predilection
for textual manipulation and the manner in which she links subjectivity to
textuality, we understand what this dream of his meant to her and how seriously
she took his desire.4 This regret and sorrow at her fathers frustration because he
insisted: I have written nothing [ . . .] done nothing with my life (Meatless Days
184), leads her to take up his truncated project after his death in 1999. Similarly,
Kureishi explains at the beginning of My Ear at His Heart that he was working on a
book project that involved thinking about the writers who had most influenced
him in the 1960s and 70s, in an effort to map out, in a sense, his intellectual
trajectory as a writer. But this project of self-exploration was interrupted by the
discovery of the manuscript of an unpublished novel written by his father,
entitled An Indian Adolescence. In an important metaliterary gesture, Kureishi
describes how this text begins to haunt him and how his reading of it becomes
another auto/biographical act, one as rewarding as it was unexpected. The
primary motivation for Goodyear and Kureishi stems, therefore, not only from
the desire to complete a parents unfulfilled dream but, importantly, the writers
appear to feel, from the consciousness that the stories of their parents are
constitutive of their own story, that that the memories of these forebears in a
sense are me, their languages partly constitute my speaking position (Parker

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DAVIS

150). The auto/biographies highlight the recognition of a personal and cultural

debt to the father, while exploring the meanings that family histories might have
for the writers present family or community. As the auto/biographer examines
his or her own memory in relation to that of others, identity is reconfigured. This
process activates a chain of associations that enables the writer (and, I would
argue, the reader) to engage the present in renewed ways.
Boys Will Be Boys is a dialogue that Sara Suleri Goodyear enacts between
herself and her father, the Pakistani journalist Z. A. Suleri, whom his children
called Pip (short for Patriotic and Preposterous) as she explores their shared
past and recognizes his continuing influence in the present. Speaking in the first
person, Goodyear positions her father as both the texts subject and its narratee,
addressing, questioning, challenging, and acknowledging him continually: When
Pip died, I moaned. I thought some remnant of me had been discarded; I needed
you to look at me and say, once again, with your unreplicated disgust, You
children (39). This narrative strategy obliges the reader to constantly shift
attention between Pip as subject and as narratee, in order to understand the
writers complex relationship with her father, her memory of him, and his
enduring significance in his childrens lives. Though the text was written after her
fathers death, his presence as motivator, guiding force, and judge of the
chronicle colors Goodyears account, even as she acknowledges (or feels) his
recognition of her gaze. Her self-consciousness about this auto/biographical
narration*/his presence as narratee and, therefore, judge not only of her
thoughts but also of her writing style*/leads her to remember him saying, On
Judgement Day, I will say to God, Be merciful, for I have already been judged by
my child (17). Notably, Goodyears continual conversation with her father
welds him to the present, though the narrative is set firmly within her memories
of her father and their extended family, their intercultural and intergenerational
relationships, their peculiar use of language, their shifting loyalties. She portrays
her father as a brilliant, irascible, blunt, yet tremendously endearing man who
could treat his children cruelly and then come out in great glee to dance under
the monsoon rains with them, making her realize, at the age of ten, that Pip is
just a child (89)*/signaling her growing understanding of this complex man.
In the context of writing about fathers, David Parkers classification of types of
intergenerational narratives of autonomy or relationality*/where the former
narrative tends to be framed by an individualistic ethics of authenticity, the
latter tends to be framed by a dialogic or interlocutive ethics of recognition*/allows us to think critically about Goodyears project (141). In her case,
following Parkers idea, she seems to feel that her father embodied
specific values that have been unrecognized or misrecognized by the dominant
narratives of the culture. These forebears have tended to slip through the
interstices of the available conventional languages, and sometimes the writers
work, even lifes work, can be seen as an attempt to find an adequate language
with which to articulate what distinctively makes them, and part of the writers
themselves, worthy for recognition. (142)

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So, though her father was an important public and intellectual figure in Pakistani
politics and culture of the mid twentieth century*/he was the editor of Dawn and
The Pakistani Times, founded The Times of Karachi, published several books,
including the fist biography of Muhammed Al Jinnah entitled My Leader (1944),
and several studies on Pakistani history and Islam*/this aspect of his life is
rendered invisible in his daughters text in favor of his powerful influence over his
familys daily life and imagination.
The daughter rarely engages her fathers public persona but rather focuses on
memories of her father in relation to herself, her mother, and her siblings. She
sets her descriptions of his peculiarities in the context of the familys relationship with him and, in particular, how his idiosyncrasies shaped her as a writer.
Indeed, considering that her father was a highly respected personage, Goodyears life writing exercise is unusual in the way it elides the public figure, to
center on the private man: The father rather than the editor and writer, though
his consciousness of being editor and writer would generally override his actions
as father. Though Goodyear cannot separate her father from the historical and
political events that made him, she represents him as transcending the repeated
shifts in their world*/newspapers and governments could come and go in
Pakistan, but there was always Pip (6).
Goodyear structures her fragmentary narrative in chapters titled with
epigraphs, culled from translations of Pips favorite Urdu poets, Yeats, a popular
song, and the Pakistani national anthem. This highlights her fathers passion for
letters, and his lifelong commitment to writing, to Pakistan, and to Urdu. I know
how pained Pip would be*/almost as pained as was I*/when I went like a
blunderbuss through the delicacies of Urdu, which surely remained his most
favored language, she exclaims (56). By foregrounding this poetry, she illustrates
her fathers obsession with language and tries to atone for her inadequacy in the
language he so loved. These epigraphs also allow her to explore her memories of
his preoccupations: Building a new nation, the existence of friendship, the nature
of Islam, and his attitude towards his children. As she chronicles in fragmented
sections her unstructured memories of life with her father, she simultaneously
recounts his role in specific events, as she invokes his (sometimes physical, often
imaginary) presence: Listen, Pip. This is not a complaint. It is history. You were
always so hither and thither, so much back and forth, that it is hard for me to be
chronological (38). Her recollection of Pip telling her that translation was not a
matter of words, but of essence (5), further justifies her narrative style which
strives to unveil her fathers personality and presence, unencumbered by the
organizational demands of plot.
Goodyears chapters are structured by images (pets, meals), persons (notably
her mother and sisters), literary references, and childhood recollections rather
than by temporal ordering or location. Thus, her articulated recollections of her
father revolve around a series of qualities that remain vivid in her mind. Her
mother meets Pip for the first time in Britain at an evening lecture on the
independence of India, where doubtless he was eloquent (10); he was always
exuberant about [his] editorials and articles, even when [he] did them every day

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(13); he possesses an astounding capacity to be amazed by his childrens

disobedience or mischief, yet she calls him my tenderhearted boy (47),
knowing how their pain at his death would have made him suffer. She also
dwells extensively on his childlike faith: Despite knowing she is a non-believer, he
presents her with a copy of the Quran*/with a heartfelt dedication*/before she
leaves for the States to study. Though he never had the chance to meet her
husband, she hears him whispering to her at night: Make him a Muslim; make
Austin a Muslim, because, he explained, if you convert someone to Islam, you
go straight to heaven! which his daughter interprets as his suggestion that this is
probably her one chance to get there, so why not give it a try? (17). His
innocent admiration for what he perceives as Al-Jinnahs modesty and leadership, for example, which, in her opinion, blinds him to the faults Goodyear sees
so clearly. Life with Pip, she appears to conclude, was often volatile, emotional,
and dramatic, but never boring.
Though Goodyear never quotes her fathers speech or writing extensively, her
account makes us aware of how his manner of speaking and his prose configured
her own discourse: Their discussions on the use of language, for example, of the
ways he transformed the pronunciation of certain words to create a private
family language (no doubt, for example, becoming no dort; Anther is Pips
rendition of another: It has entered our vocabulary, has it not Pip? [43]), and
how certain turns of phrase were among his favorites (like far be it from me
[74]), and the hours of reading to him that Sara spent as she was growing up and
later, when his blindness set in. She also recognizes the role he played in making
her a writer: Apart from reading to each other, she acknowledges how his writing
style formed hers. As a young girl, she was frequently assigned the task of
meticulously transcribing his articles into a legible hand, only to watch him
chisel (his word for revise) the piece, requiring her to rewrite page after
page. No wonder I have such an adamantly different style of writing, she notes,
when each word I put down on paper is both my first and my last. [ . . .] Its Pip,
the influence of Pip (42).
Ultimately, the narrative is a valedictory for the father that loomed so large in
Goodyears imagination. His childrens collective frustration at his temper and
unpredictability is balanced by their awareness of his fierce love for them and
clear enjoyment of their varied ways. Goodyear recalls, for example, the
laughter and obvious pleasure he would take in recounting a story of her
childhood, when, at a formal dinner at a European hotel, she looks up and
announces, Papa, Im going to be naughty in a minute (102). Oh, Pip, how you
roared with laughter as you recounted and recounted that story! she writes,
partly in amusement at how such a trivial childhood comment could produce such
enjoyment and also with deep gratitude at his obvious affection and delight in his
children. Describing a visit to her fathers sickbed, Goodyear writes: It is true,
Pip: when one of us walked into your room, you would look up with such a
radiance in your face, that one asked for nothing, nothing but the joy of
presence. It was a very profound compliment that you conferred, which,
however life enriching, was also curiously humbling. With humility we

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approached you, which is another way of expressing the joy we too were feeling,
to be once again in the aura of your remarkable presence (59). Their
astonishment at how small their fathers body actually was at the time of his
death limns the manner of his presence in their life and imagination. As her
brother-in-law, Farooq explains: I could not believe he was so small, [ . . .] he
always struck you as larger-than-life (47).
This comment encapsulates, in important ways, the kind of memory Goodyear
has of her father and explains the reason behind the form of the text. The
conversation she establishes with her father and her memory of him in Boys Will
Be Boys challenges traditional forms of life writing as she authorizes herself to
write her fathers story by blending the elegy with multiple acts of selfrepresentation. By complicating the notion of auto/biographical author and
through her fusion of subject and narratee, she produces a highly original text
that invites readers to reexamine uncritical notions regarding pertinent forms of
address in life writing. By writing in this manner, she expands our understanding
of the ways auto/biography may be written and of its potential for filling in gaps
and fulfilling dreams.
Goodyears auto/biography of/for her father, based primarily on her memories
of him, allows us to think about how memory functions in the representation of
relational lives. Yet, as Roger Porter argues, we no longer uncritically accept the
notion of memory as the sole basis for autobiography (100). Kureishis text
illustrates Porters claim that important autobiographical texts challenge this
assumption that life writing begins with remembering, to privilege an investigation through diverse forms of evidence, most commonly official documents,
photographs, letters, public records, etc. (100). Taking as his point of departure
the unpublished manuscript of An Indian Adolescence (though by the end of the
text the author will have found two more novels), Kureishi then becomes what
Porter calls a sleuth of selfhood, one who gathers documents and sifts through
clues to establish evidence: The subject of the text is the search itself, the plot
of the life writing exercise governed by the process of investigation and its
results (100). In this case, the nature of the search provides clues as to the nature
of the relationship between father and son and can also offer insights as to the
identity of the researcher/son, or, importantly, to the identity the son wants to
emphasize. For me, Kureishi states, this has become a quest, for a place in my
fathers history and fantasy, and for the reasons my father lived the semi-broken
life he did. Im looking for the way in which a particular adult life is a response to
childhood, an answer to the questions that this particular childhood asked
(29/30).5
For Kureishi, receiving his fathers manuscript and reading it autobiographically allows him to enter a previously unknown world. The life that father
recounts in his novels is one the son does not share, though he recognizes parts
of it from fragments of stories heard as a child. According to Cousers definition,
this is a portrait story, one which tends to be essayistic and impressionistic;
rather than narrating the fathers life, or even the course of the authors
relationship with the father, they limn the character of the parent through

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DAVIS

representative, but not sequential stories (Couser 133). Bruce King calls
Kureishis method of examining his fathers manuscript for clues about his life
and psychology, which involves reading the novel as an autobiographical text,
deconstructive psychoanalysis (84). As with Goodyears narrative of her father,
there is a sustained dialogue in this text with both the fathers character and
influence on his sons life and choice of career. One perceives a fascinating
shifting ambivalence on Kureishis part: Growing up, he strove for separation
from his father yet recognizes that the familial connection and affinity could not
be denied and, ultimately, became part of his personality and career.
Kureishis approach to his fathers manuscript must be understood in the light
of a writers complex career, which involved a difficult relationship with a father
who had written newspaper articles about Pakistan, books about squash and
cricket, two books for young readers about Pakistan, yet yearned to publish a
novel. At first, Kureishi postpones reading the manuscript: I do anticipate being
shocked and, probably, moved and disturbed. Will it be dreadful, a masterpiece,
or something in between? Will it tell me a little, too much, or just the right
amount? Why hesitate now? I wonder whether it will contain some sort of
message to me, and how I might respond (6). Most importantly, the writer
acknowledges that he owes his career choice to his father and feels his fathers
presence to this day: Yet, sometimes, I think I go to my desk only to obey my
father. This might explain why Im so furious when I arrive there and why I dont
know what to do when Im finished (10).
When he finally dares read the manuscript, he acknowledges that he has
entered a metaliterary labyrinth, a maze of information he now has to
negotiate: his fathers version of his familys past, his dream of becoming a
writer, his relationship with his English wife, the nature of their childrens
upbringing, and the postcolonial context he lived in. The doubts continue, to the
end of the book:
What have I been doing, opening up father like this, examining, diagnosing,
operating on him, so that this work feels like a cross between love-making and an
autopsy? I have to say I dont know what sort of a book I am making here, as I spin
my words out of his stories, stories out of other stories. It feels more like a pot
into which I am stirring almost everything that occurs to me. [. . .] I feel guilty
about what I am doing to the family. By what right can I do this? Who does father,
or anyone, belong to? Yet I am still curious about this method, and want to
continue. How can plain curiosity be unkind? (94)

The recurring discomfort Kureishi struggles with arises from his own biases
regarding the autobiographical dimension of novels and his attitude towards his
fathers novels. Though he confesses that it annoys me, as it might any novelist,
to have my own work reduced to autobiography, as though youve just written
down what happened (15), he commits the sin of reading his own fathers text
autobiographically.6 He explains this by noting that
although dads book is written in the third person, switching occasionally, by
mistake into the first, I have to say it seems inevitable that I will read his stories
as personal truths, if not in the detail then in the feeling. [. . .] Still, whatever my

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father has made, I will be reconstructing him from these fragments or traces,
attempting to locate his self in these imaginings or scatterings. But where else
would you look? (15)

He remembers his fathers insistence that his text was fiction, in spite of the
agents suggestion that it might be easier to publish if it were presented as
autobiography. The author struggles with the genre definition: Certainly, the
book is full of dialogue, character and dramatised incident. Perhaps father
needed it to be a novel because it contained so much truth. In order to speak, he
required the disguise of character and imposed narrative (16).
In spite of the fathers injunction to the contrary, Kureishi chooses to read his
fathers text as life writing. He thus reads this story about a middle-class family
in Poona before and during Independence, Partition and the subsequent diaspora,
as the story of his fathers family. Two added events emphasize this approach:
first, he uses his Uncle Omar Kureishis two-volume autobiography as a prism
through which to test the veracity of his fathers version. He notes connections
between real names and those used in the novel (the main character is Shani
and his fathers nickname was Shanoo; he wonders if the brother named
Mahmood might be Omar; their father, Colonel Kureishi becomes Colonel
Murad) or discrepancies with reality (such as the number of siblings his father
had), continually attempting to justify to himself his fathers generic choice of
the term novel for this text:
Although there is only one sibling in An Indian Adolescence there were, in fact,
twelve children, of which one had died. [. . .] Perhaps father cleared out the rest
of the family in order to concentrate on one particular brother, on one
representative tension, and that is why he called it a novel. (18)

Second, as he recounts particular details of the novel, he conflates descriptions

of the main character, Shani, with thoughts about his father: Sitting at his desk,
Shani ponders what he will do with his life. Mahmood is planning to study for the
Bar in London. But Colonel Murad wants my father to attend the Military
Academy, which dad isnt keen to do (51). Thus, Kureishi basically rewrites his
fathers novel as autobiography by insisting on reading it as a life writing
exercise, stressing connections with reality, justifying divergences, using the
novels insights to understand his fathers life, and contextualizating his fathers
personality in a particular family, social class, and post/colonial world.
According to both the novel and Kureishis reading of it, Shanoo came to
London after the Partition, along with numerous migrants of that generation. He
worked as a civil servant in the Pakistani Embassy though his obsessions were
reading and cricket. Interestingly, these two obsessions are shared by his
son*/who became the published and successful writer. The unacknowledged
rivalry between father and son connects importantly with Shanoos piercing
competitiveness with his brother, Omar, who also became a published writer
(though less adept cricket player). The sons central discovery concerns his
fathers difficult relationship with his own father, a remote man who gambled
and made absurd demands on his children. Kureishi remembers how his father
also criticized him continuously:

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Reading my fathers book I am becoming aware that, partly, I was being made to
feel as bad a he had felt. He might want me to be successful, as his father had
required him to be, but he was afraid of me becoming too powerful or rivalrous.
(43)

But this discovery is complicated when his mother gives him another unpublished
novel, The Redundant Man. The first novel, about a child in conflict with his
parents, leads to its sequel (which nonetheless appears to have been written
earlier), which focuses on a fathers conflict with his children. The protagonist,
Yusef, a fifty-year old Pakistani man, lives in Britain during the Thatcher
reorganisations of the early 80s, when unemployment was high and the idea
which life in the suburbs was built around*/that people would have jobs for
life*/was breaking down (96). Though Kureishis father did not lose his job,
many others around him did. More shockingly for Kureishi, who insists on also
reading this text as autobiography, is that his father has written about his son:
Here I am, according to dad or, rather, Yusef: I looked in disgust at his unshaven
face, his grubby black sweater, greasy jeans and crushed white shirt. The son he
has created is a brown cockney bum (111). The author describes this
discovery as disconcerting, though he admits that
I am not a pretty sight, dripping with CND badges and chains. [. . .] Certainly
father and I had many conflicts at this time, and it is informative, to say the
least, to hear it from his point of view. He hated my hair, my independence, my
aggression towards him, just as I loathed his advice and his desire to humiliate
me. (112)

The existence of these novels leads him to understand one of the most important
of his fathers questions: how do you find something to do which carries its own
meaning, that is significant in itself, and which cannot be doubted as a value? The
question also becomes, how should I live? (99). The answer, the son comprehends, lies in the texts*/his father believed that being a writer
was the cure for doubt. Self-expression as an artist was the most important thing
and its own justification. Writers are beholden to no one else, they are their own
masters, and being dependent*/on his brothers, for instance, or mother*/made
dad crazy. (99)

Kureishi also stresses that

If the absence of belonging is considered to be the immigrants particular
bugbear, dad was fascinated by another kind of belonging, which might be called
a vocation. In this notion of fathers, there were two sorts of people*/those who
knew what they wanted to do, and those who didnt. My father was the latter but
he wanted to be the former. (99)

The existence of the fathers manuscripts*/there are further references to

unpublished plays and other writings*/attests that, though it is the son who was
the successful writer, the father also engaged this idealized vocation seriously. In
this discovery, perhaps, the son reaches an intimacy with his father that was
absent when he was growing up.

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Ultimately, Kureishis project is as much about the present and future as it is

about the past. Now that he is a father himself, he eagerly shares the novel with
his young sons who are also beginning to learn that they have entered a family
story, and are curious to see where, and how, they fit into it (22). His fathers
dream of becoming a writer fueled the sons ambition*/he recognizes that his
father gave him what he had wanted for himself, particularly a love of writing
which, Kureishi admits has been a pleasure that has sustained and made me
(198). My Ear at His Heart, then becomes a debt paid, a final reconciliation on
two levels. First, by publishing the memoir, he acknowledges that Father has at
last received from me what he wanted when he sat down to write each
morning: His stories have been read, pored over, lived with, become the subject
of conversation (194); second, there is gratitude in the sons happiness
at fulfilling his fathers unfulfilled dream: Being a story-teller, making a living
by my pen, getting the children through*/father would have considered it a
decent way to live, an achievement, built on a family history of which he was
part (198).
Goodyear and Kureishis texts end with a powerful sense of a having brought
closure to the lives of their fathers, demonstrating, as John Barbour notes, how
unfinished business between parents and children structures many recent family
memoirs. Boys Will Be Boys and My Ear at His Heart patently illustrate how an
unresolved relationship with a parent can stimulate and shape life writing in
crucial ways (Barbour 19). By engaging their fathers lives and their fathers texts
in an auto/biographical project that completes the fathers dream of writing and
being published, both writers signal their awareness of their moral obligation to
do so precisely because it was their fathers who molded them into writers. The
notion of fathering is complicated in these auto/biographies as Goodyear and
Kureishi*/their fathers children, after all*/complete Pip and Shanoos unfulfilled
vocation to be writers. Simultaneously, they, in a sense, acknowledge a doubled
process of fathering: The parents produce the children*/frustrated writers
beget successful authors*/who father narratives of filiation. We perceive a
profound connection between the nature of the project, the specific form of the
auto/biographical act, and the identity of the author as both child and writer.
Porter notes that the impulse to reveal, even to expose the parent*/an impulse
which often comprises the lions share of the text*/underlies the nature of the
autobiographical self: How he or she undertakes the task determines who the
writer is (102). The possibility of being or becoming a writer because of the filial
influence makes the task of writing the fathers unwritten autobiography so
imperative. Yet, a strong sense of autonomy permeates the texts*/even as they
acknowledge the debt to their fathers, both Goodyear and Kureishi signal their
difference from them. The interplay between connection and independence
marks these texts as important examples of recent relational texts that dialogue
not only with issues of relationality, but also invite us to consider the ways in
which intersubjectivity can be articulated in transcultural contexts.

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DAVIS

Notes
[1]

I use the term auto/biography, as Susanna Egan and Gabrielle Helms explain, to
acknowledge the complexity of current work: The slash signals

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the broad continuum of life writing discourses that range from writing
about the self (auto) to writing about another (biography). That slash also
acknowledges that today contemporary auto/biographers increasingly
practice, and theorists are recognizing, original and creative approaches
to these genres, a combining or blending of genres to produce, for
example, the collaborative work or the family memoir, the art installation,
the film, or the web site that combine performance of identity with
sophisticated levels of irony and full consciousness of theoretical implications. (6/7)
[2]

Eakin defines the most common form of what he calls the relational life as those
autobiographies
that feature the decisive impact on the autobiographer of either (1) an
entire social environment (a particular kind of family, or a community and
its social institutions*/schools, churches, and so forth) or (2) key other
individuals, usually family members, especially parents. (69)

[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]

See Eakin, Egan, and Michael M. J. Fischers Autobiographical Voices (1,2,3) and
Mosaic Memory: Experimental Sondages in the (Post)Modern World for more
perspectives on the relational component to life writing.
See my A task of reclamation: Subjectivity, Self-Representation, and Textual
Formulation in Sara Suleris Meatless Days for a discussion of these issues in Suleris
writing.
Kureishis essay Something Given: Reflections on Writing, published in 2002 but
written earlier, centers on his fathers dream of being a published writer and how his
fathers ambition fueled his own. Though the essay makes several references to the
novels his father wrote and describes his father actually sitting down and writing
them, we understand that Kureishi never actually read any of them until just before
working on My Ear at His Heart. The essay thus serves as an interesting companion
piece to the auto/biography.
See Susie Thomas article for a discussion of Kureishis ambivalent thoughts regarding
the notion of writing or reading autobiographically and issues such as the legitimacy
of the use of biographical information as part of the reading process. She also notes
the irony in Kureishis manner of approaching his fathers work in a way that he would
object to if used for his own work.

References
Barbour, John D. Solitude, Writing, and Fathers in Paul Austers The Invention of
Solitude. a/b: Auto/biography Studies 19.1,2 (Summer and Winter 2004): 19/32.
Couser, G. Thomas. Genre Matters: Form, Force, and Filiation. Life Writing 2.2 (2005):
123/140.
Davis, Roco G. A task of reclamation: Subjectivity, Self-Representation, and Textual
Formulation in Sara Suleris Meatless Days. Asian North American Identities: Beyond
the Hyphen. Ed Eleanor Ty and Donald Goellnicht. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2004. 117/129.

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Eakin, Paul John. How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves. Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1999.
Egan, Susanna. Mirror Talk: Genres of Crisis in Contemporary Autobiography. Chapel Hill:
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Egan, Susanna and Gabriele Helms. Editorial: Auto/biography? Yes. But Canadian?
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