Reviewing a brave and funny memoir | getting out on the town

BOOK REVIEW

In one line in this book, Laurie Steed writes that he wanted his work to be “timeless rather than timely”. With Love, Dad he has achieved both.

Steed is a Perth author, writing mentor and manuscript assessor, and the partnerships and development manager at Writing WA. He is a well known and loved personality in the WA writing community, having befriended many emerging writers and nurtured many careers, including mine. He brought us the beautiful novel You Belong Here, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. He has sidestepped into memoir here, on the suggestion of one of his own little sons.

What it says on the cover is what you get. The coming-of-age memoir of an author dad struggling with his own father’s illness and mortality and his own mental health journey even as he shepherds two little boys from birth to school age.

It’s about the transcendent moments children bring, and the wrench that it is to part with them, which all parents will relate to. Scenes of Steed dancing joyously with his older boy, Noah, and having a “last Daddy-Josh” day with his smaller child before returning to work full-time, brought tears to my eyes.

It also confronts the endless and engulfing fear that everyone sometimes feels for those they love, the equally endless small domestic drudgeries of parenting and marriage, and the loneliness and yearning that sometimes plagues, if not all of us, surely most of us – and certainly me.

But this is not just a book about parenting, or even just about anxiety.

It’s about masculinity: being a man and brother and husband and son and son-in-law. Furthermore, being a creative facing the relentless conflict between their own need to produce creative work with the need to provide for their family.

Being, more specifically, a writer. And refreshingly, the bits of being a writer we hardly speak of, even to each other: the cruel, immodest, mostly unacknowledged hopes that we will be the next big thing; the embarrassingly ungrateful, wholly unacknowledged disappointment of discovering we are not. The setbacks that really hurt, and cause us to persistently question our value in our chosen field and ask ourselves whether all the conflict of work versus family, all the sacrifice, is even worth it. As well as the things we do acknowledge: achievement, reward, and the progress that sacrifice does eventually bring – such as the moment Noah tells his Dad to write the story that has become this book.

Love, Dad is brave, honest, thoughtful and vulnerable: a memoir for the modern man. It is frequently beautiful but never flowery or overblown. It is personable and relatable and read-bits-aloud funny, full of the kind of hilarious vignettes only family can provide.

Reading it is like having a really satisfying talk with a mate. There is a scene of Steed and a friend listening to a song and appreciating “how silly and exquisite a song can be when it no longer has to be perfect.” And really, with this he could be describing his own wonderful book, both its meaning and the experience of reading it.

If you’re a dad, a man, an anxious person or someone who just likes to laugh, or you know someone who’s any of those, buy it for yourself or for them. It’s out for preorder now. All the usual faceless chains and local bookshops.

AUTHOR NEWS

Things have NOT slowed down since travelling to Queensland to pitch The Last Bookshop to movie producers and doing a reading of The Disorganisation of Celia Stone at the recent Fogarty Literary awards. The publication date is September 1 and I have a launch to (somehow) organise, plus the calendar for August and September is filling with marketing events already, including something very exciting that I will soon be able to share!

AUTHOR EVENT

Want to write three publishable books in five years, while holding down a full-time job? Want to take time off to travel and write? This Saturday 10am at Morley Library I'm doing a free talk about how I manage life, work and money and how you can too.

Book here, hope to see you! https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/balancing-writing-and-work-making-the-time-until-you-can-buy-it-tickets-635150150197

If you can’t make this one, there will definitely be other library talks coming up, including one in the City of Melville in September, so stay tuned.

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