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Feb 22, 2016 Web Exclusive By Frank Valish

Chris Offutt’s father was a writer of pornographic fiction. Voluminous amounts of pornographic fiction. 1800 pounds of it, to be precise. When Offutt’s father passed away in 2013, the son was tasked with emptying his father’s office and, in doing so found himself coming to terms with both his father’s disturbing legacy and his own atypical childhood. My Father, The Pornographer is Chris Offutt’s journey.

From the late 1960s through nearly until his death, Andrew Offutt was prolific, generating 400 books under 18 different pseudonyms. But smut is not the subject of his son’s memoir, only the context through which he tells his tale. In My Father, The Pornographer, Chris Offutt tells the story of a childhood navigating a household run by a difficult, demanding man with a perverse obsession. Isolation and self-protection become the name of the game for the author, and with his father’s death and being confronted with the elder Offutt’s life’s work, he tries to get a grip on who his father was, what made his father tick, and how this ultimately affected not only his family life growing up but also the person he has become.

In Offutt’s balanced, honest, and open portrayal, his father is by turns a reviled and sympathetic (through the prism of his own troubled life and mentally crippling obsession) character. The author, despite the personal nature of his narrative, somehow seems to remain objective. As such, My Father, The Pornographer is something of an investigation, into how things unravel, why people are they way they are, and the affects these things have on families, children, and the adults they become. Offutt’s memoir offers few answers. Often, he tries in vain to gain insight, but it is often elusive. We are left with nearly as many questions at the end of the book as we had in the beginning. Hopefully, in writing his story, Offutt at the very least gained perspective. The bravery it must have taken to lay his story out for all to see is more than admirable. It’s heroic. (www.atria-books.com)

Author rating: 7.5/10