MADreads

Baking, forgiveness

February 10th, 2009 Barbara - Alicia Ashman

Memoirs by adult survivors of dysfunctional families are a proliferating sub-genre, but this one is particularly appealing and readable.  Life, Death & Bialys: A Father/Son Baking Story is a story of love and anger and forgiveness — funny, wry and bittersweet.

Dylan Schaffer and his father, Flip, shared a passion for cooking, a single tenuous connection in their fragile and distant relationship.  They barely knew one another, having spent little time together since Flip walked out on the family when Dylan and his siblings were very young.

When Flip telephoned in November and suggested that they take a week-long, intensive bread-making class in New York in June, Dylan reluctantly agreed, figuring his dad would probably be dead by the time the class would start.  Flip (the kind of hardcore cigarette addict who smoked in the shower) had been diagnosed with metastatic lung cancer.

Dylan is nursing a lifetime of fury at his father, a history professor who accepted a position in South Carolina and left his ex-wife and four children behind in New York.  In outline, Dylan’s mother was a resoundingly successful woman: married at seventeen, and mother of four before age thirty, she also managed to graduate from medical school, finish her internship and become a financially-successful psychiatrist.  In reality, she was an abysmal parent, crippled by a depression that ultimately ended in suicide.  Dylan’s dad was fully aware of his ex-wife’s instability, but never involved himself in parenting his children.

In spending a week baking bread with a father he barely knows, who ought to be dead, Dylan discovers a lot about himself, his dad, and levain.  This first part of the book is framed by their adventures in New York (impossible father books an awful hotel, is alternately rude and gallant, charming and repellent).  The second section has papa back at his home and at the end of his life, which is in turns heart-breaking and side-splittingly funny.

Almost everyone has difficult relatives that we love and nobody is spared watching beloved people die — but Dylan Schaffer tells his particular story about his particularly difficult “Poppala” really well.  Read it and you will laugh and cry and be glad you did.

p.s. Don’t miss the acknowledgments at the back of the book.  I am hoping mystery writer Schaffer’s next book will incorporate the real-life story of his murder solving mail carrier.

Entry Filed under: Memoir & Biography, Nonfiction