“From each of the fathers I took the things I needed, and then I turned them into stories.” Revisit Ann Patchett’s Personal History about the three dads who shaped her life as a writer.
Of course, that could never happen. It would have killed my father if I dedicated a book to Mike. These were the issues I wrestled with in middle school.
Mike bought great books monthly as well, and, like my father, he got them in full leather. Mike liked sets. Sets of Shakespeare, of Dickens. There was a cunning little set of Chekhov stories that sat on his desk while he read Ian Fleming and James Clavell. He taught me how to play chess, drive a car, throw a knife, develop black-and-white photographs. He taught all of us how to shoot—rifles, shotguns, handguns—then how to take those guns apart to clean them.
Mike started getting serious about writing short stories after we left the farm, when I was in junior high. He worked on them endlessly, by which I mean he wrote many, many stories but almost never wrote a second draft. He would scrawl them out on yellow legal pads as fast as a court reporter, give them to his secretary to type, and then give them to me to read.
I started reading those novels when I was in college, which he paid for me to attend. One of the only real fights I remember us having was when I told him that he couldn’t pay for me to go to graduate school. I had got a financial-aid package that required me to teach literature, but he didn’t want me teaching. He didn’t want me to have any sort of job.
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