My Father, The Pornographer by Chris Offutt
{Trigger warning: the book reviewed in this post contains many passages of a highly adult nature. The book includes depictions of sexual violence and molestation.}
Today is World Book Day, an event organized by UNESCO to promote reading, publishing, and copyright. In a weird way, it seems that this is the right occasion to review the latest memoir by Kentucky's King of Grit Lit, Chris Offutt.
It goes without saying that a book entitled "My Father, the Pornographer" isn't a work for everyone. At times, I wasn't even sure it was for me, and I rather love Mr. Offutt's writing. This memoir is, as one would expect, gritty and often ugly. It's also a surprisingly funny, delicate, and beautiful tribute to a complex, weak, and ultimately flawed father.
Chris Offutt, the Rowan County native, author, and sometime television screenwriter, has never shied away from ugly subjects. When he returned to his childhood home in the tiny Eastern Kentucky town of Haldeman to sort through the personal effects of his father Andrew, he found himself -- an Iowa Writers' Workshop-trained professor of English at Ole Miss -- facing the literal body of work his father had produced: over 400 pornographic novels.
Mr. Offutt in his father's office. Image via The New York Times.
Mr. Offutt creates a fascinating world for his reader: a spot-on depiction of Kentucky life, from his mother's working-class Irish Catholic early life in Lexington to the family's prosperous years when Andrew owned two insurance agencies and owned the only Mercedes-Benz in Rowan County. The Offutts were always outsiders. Of his Appalachian childhood, Mr. Offutt writes:
My experience was similar to the children of career diplomats from the colonial era -- we lived in the big house, we had extra money, we mingled with the locals but never fit in. We even spoke a different language, what my father called 'the Queen's English' instead of the grammatically incorrect dialect of the hill. Other kids learned to hunt and fish; I learned to speak properly.
When young Chris needed braces, his father determined that the best way to pay for orthodontic work and write porn full-time. (You know, as one does...) andrew j. offutt (as he styled his signature) would go on to write several works of science fiction and fantasy that gained a cult following, while his pornographer alter-ego John Cleve produced adult fiction under a variety of pseudonyms. (Offutt Sr. had separate wardrobes and working habits when he adopted the Cleve persona.) Chris Offutt and his siblings grew up in a fascinating and terrifying world of family vacations to Sci-Fi Conventions, verbal abuse, and swinging '70s values; it's hard to imagine these events taking place in an insular rural Kentucky town that was looked down upon by the "city folk" of Morehead.
And yet, this memoir works so well because Mr. Offutt's depiction of rural Kentucky is stunning in its authenticity and clarity. If you can get past the dirty parts and the scary parts, it's easily the most spot-on description of Eastern Kentucky that I've read in the past decade. It's a hillbilly version of Pat Conroy's The Death of Santini without the apologies or the flowery language. It's an unflinching portrayal of a really screwed up childhood. And it's the best book about Kentucky I've read in a damned long time.