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My Father Before Me: A Memoir Audiobook
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An award-winning poet offers a multigenerational portrait of an American family—weaving together the lives of his ancestors, his parents, and his own coming of age in the 1960s and ’70s in the wake of his father’s suicide, in this superbly written, “fiercely honest” (Nick Flynn) memoir.
The fifth of eight children, Chris Forhan was born into a family of silence. He and his siblings learned, without being told, that certain thoughts and feelings were not to be shared. On the evenings his father didn’t come home, the rest of the family would eat dinner without him, his whereabouts unknown, his absence pronounced but not mentioned. And on a cold night in 1973, just before Christmas, Forhan’s father killed himself in the carport.
Forty years later, Forhan bravely considers the way he is and is not his father’s son, digging into his family’s past, and finding within each generation the same abandonment, loss, and silence in which he was raised. Like Ian Frazier in Family or Frank McCourt in Angela’s Ashes, Forhan shows his family members as both a part and a product of their time.
My Father before Me is a family history, an investigation into a death, and a stirring portrait of growing up in an Irish Catholic childhood, all set against a backdrop of America from the Great Depression to the Ramones.
Marrying the literary scope of memoirists Geoffrey Wolff and J. R. Moehringer with the intensity of family novels like The Corrections and We Are Not Ourselves, My Father before Me is the kind of epic, immersive memoir that comes along once in a decade.
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“George Newbern expertly delivers Forhan’s memoir. His voice for the author reflects the various stages of his life, finding meaning in memories…The premise of the memoir suggests a somber experience for the listener, but Newbern’s performance is filled with both light and dark textures as Forhan examines his family’s unspoken rules of conduct about what is discussed openly and what is left unsaid.”
— AudioFile
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“Beautifully written.”
— Seattle Times -
“Achingly beautiful…a triumph.”
— Buffalo News -
“A wonderfully engrossing book. Essential for all parents and children, that is, all people.”
— Library Journal (starred review) -
“In the tradition of Geoffrey Wolff…a powerful family story.”
— Booklist -
“Forhan’s aching, lyrical memoir excavates both a lost father and a lost era in American history.”
— BookPage
Awards
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A Library Journal Best Books of the Year Selection
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About Chris Forhan
Chris Forhan is the author of the memoir My Father before Me, as well as poetry collections Forgive Us Our Happiness, winner of the Bakeless Prize; The Actual Moon, The Actual Stars, winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize; and Black Leapt In, chosen by poet Phillis Levin for the Barrow Street Press Book Prize. He was raised in Seattle and earned an MA from the University of New Hampshire and an MFA from the University of Virginia. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and two Pushcart Prizes. His poetry has been anthologized in The Best American Poetry 2008 and has appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, New England Review, Parnassus, and other magazines. He teaches at Butler University in Indianapolis.
About George Newbern
George Newbern is an Earphones Award–winning narrator and a television and film actor best known for his roles as Brian MacKenzie in Father of the Bride and Father of the Bride Part II, as well as Danny in Friends. As a voice actor, he is notable for his role as Superman on the Cartoon Newtork series Static Shock, Justice League, and Justice League Unlimited. He has guest starred on many television series, including Scandal, The Mentalist, Private Practice, CSI: Miami, and Numb3rs. He holds a BA in theater arts from Northwestern University.