At the center of this absorbing memoir is Seth Lerer s father Larry, a lapsed actor, a teacher who never achieved his ambition of becoming a school principal, a man of bluster whose theater of majesty was the front seat of his car. He was also gaylargely closeted during Seth s youth, and later, after his divorce from Seth s mother and living in San Francisco, openly homosexual. Reading is Seth s ballast during childhood years roiled by his bitter mother and high-spirited but feckless father. While Seth is in college, Larry ...
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At the center of this absorbing memoir is Seth Lerer s father Larry, a lapsed actor, a teacher who never achieved his ambition of becoming a school principal, a man of bluster whose theater of majesty was the front seat of his car. He was also gaylargely closeted during Seth s youth, and later, after his divorce from Seth s mother and living in San Francisco, openly homosexual. Reading is Seth s ballast during childhood years roiled by his bitter mother and high-spirited but feckless father. While Seth is in college, Larry drops out of his life for long stretches, then makes sudden, mortifying reappearances. As Seth comes through his own struggles with imposture and identity, he commits himself to literature, studying Anglo-Saxon and"Beowulf." A scholarship takes him to Oxford, where he learns Old Norse, which in turn inspires him to live in Iceland for a year. The scene shifts from Icelandic pastoral to the gothic spires the University of Chicago during Richard McKeon and Wayne Booth s heyday, where Seth survives a different kind of rite of passage. We leave Seth still trying to be a good son after Larry s death, sorting the secrets of his closetand himself learning to be a good father to a struggling son."
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