Reading My Father

Books and sadness and anxiety, wheeee!

This summer I read two of my father’s books. The first was Wreckage, the novel he was writing when he died. The novel he had been writing, I should say—he had stopped a few months before his death, resigned to the fact that he would not be able to finish it.

(Hold on—there are a lot of new people here. Hello! Welcome! I’m Emma. I’m a novelist and so was my father, Peter Straub. He died two years ago this September, which means we’re coming up on some more grief content, I would imagine. Because there is no plan for this Substack other than what it on my mind, and well, seems like grief might be surfacing.)

I’d read some of the book, years ago. Ten years ago? Probably more. My clearest memory of the book in progress in those early days is at a dinner party at my parents’ house (a house they moved out of in 2015). Lorrie Moore came over and she is as beautiful and brilliant and funny as you imagine she would be, and we were all just tripping over our feet with excitement to be with her, and my dad started describing the plot of this book, and it went on for about forty-five minutes. It’s a complicated book, is what I’m saying. It’s about a serial killer in Milwaukee and Jack the Ripper and a haunted paining and Henry James and it is so full of my dad that I was really putting off reading it, because over the last two years, every time I have read something that he wrote, I have burst into tears, and you really can’t sustain that over the course of reading a whole novel.

My mother was on me about it—we (my mother, my brother and I) were going to put together a forward for a small press edition of the unfinished book. I finally agreed to a date, and so as that date approached, I started reading. I didn’t cry. Instead, I felt overwhelmingly lucky to have had a father who left so much behind—not just so many books for us and others to enjoy, but so much of himself inside those books. Easter eggs for those in the know—family names, or places in Milwaukee, where my parents grew up, jazz musicians he loved. In my experience, most novelists do this. I certainly do. I said to a friend the other day that something not everyone knows about novelists is how much time we spend amusing ourselves. It’s a good perk for people who work alone.

When my dad decided that he was going to stop working on his novel, for about 24 hours, he floated some other options—have me finish it, which was quickly ruled out, as I am not a good rule follower, and am squeamish about scary stuff, or maybe have a young horror writer finish. That was quickly ruled out too. He didn’t want the book to be out of his control. It was his to write or not to write, not anyone else’s.

I’ve been meditating for the last —hang on, let me check my app— 32 weeks. How many months is 32 weeks? It’s nice that weeks are smaller. I started doing it while in the grips of some acute panic attacks, and it has helped my brain and anxiety enormously. Writing, for me, is so much like meditating. Focus. One thing at a time. Pushing away distractions. Noticing them, but not getting pulled away. I am terrible at not getting pulled away. But I keep trying.

I like thinking about my father working on this book for so many years as a sort of meditation. He loved to work—we never, ever took a family vacation where he wasn’t also working. He never even went to the hospital without a notebook and his favorite pens and pencils. Writing meant everything to him. More than publishing. It’s nice to remember that there is a difference.

The other book of his that I read this summer is Shadowland, which was originally published in 1980, just like me. The last time I read this book was probably thirty years ago, and it was so much fun to read it again. He was 34 or 35 when he wrote it, younger than I am now, and having read everything he’s written since then, it’s fun to see him in his youth. The book is about two teenage boys at a prep school where bad things happen (my father hated his prep school, where he was one of two scholarship students, so it wasn’t a surprise when things went up in flames). It’s about magic and friendship and finding yourself creatively—creating yourself. It’s a great fucking book, and the new edition looks so fabulous, and if you like dark academia or magic or beautiful sentences, you will love it. It’s not very bloody, though there is some blood. And just like Wreckage, my dad is everywhere in it—his school friends’ names, my parents’ wedding anniversary, jazz musicians he loved—he’s on every page, waving. I didn’t cry at all, but I did laugh out loud a few times, which was me waving back at him.

Get your copy of Shadowland here.