Daddy; an erotic memoir

Rating:
Summary: weak writing expressing a courageous point of view
Review: 'Daddy' addresses the often difficult topic of incest. I've always seen there as being two types of incest.
The first type involves an adult taking advantage of a child below, often far below, the age of consent and
causing the child great pain and often emotional scarring for life because of the profound abuse of power.
This type of incest quite properly horrifies most people, and the more abusive the situation, the more
horrible it is. The second type of incest involves consenting sexual relations between closely related
adults. This type seems to me to be far more morally ambiguous, although it still seems to evoke feelings
of shock and revulsion among many people--but these feelings seem less rational to me than in cases of
sexual abuse of a child, and are perhaps based upon people's fears of confronting their own sexual attraction
to family members. Feelings of sexual attraction to family members are no doubt quite widespread--I am
told by a woman who works as a prostitute in a legalized Australian brothel that it is fairly common for
male family members to come in and pay for sexual intercourse with their mothers, sisters, or daughters--
though it isn't necessarily talked about a lot.

So this book had an interesting, and controversial, topic to work with and had the courage to take a
difficult point of view. It tells the story, from the father's point of view, of a father who is reunited
with his two adult daughters after being separated from them early in their lives. The father quickly
develops a mutually consentual sexual relationship with both daughters. The book doesn't particularly
moralize but rather presents this as being a perfectly normal activity--which, as noted earlier, it may
well be. It was courageous to publish a book like this which had the potential to, and did, generate a
lot of controversy because it took a default position against prevailing public opinion where a lot of
people have very strong--if not always well thought out--emotions.

The difficulty is that, for all its potential, the book itself simply isn't all that good. The
author/father spends a good deal of time describing all the physical specifics of his relations with
his daughters in more detail than I really needed or wanted to know. As sex, it just isn't all that
interesting--it is physically no different from any other sexual relationship between a man and a
woman and didn't particularly interest me to hear it described in detail. We don't learn that much about
the topic of incest--how did the fact that these were incestual relationships affect the participants
involved? What is the author's feeling about the incest taboo in society in general, and how does he
feel it can be overcome--or should it be overcome? How open should people about incest, trading off
the need to be true to oneself with the fact that it is almost universally taboo and more often than not
illegal? These are not questions the author needs to come to a final answer about, but they are
really not addressed at all--instead we get details about sexual relationships that are too graphic,
at least for me, to be really considered erotic.

I cautiously recommend this book because of the important point of view it presents, but I'm hoping
that in the near future we will see similar books that are much better written.

Rating:
Summary: weak writing expressing a courageous point of view
Review: Anyone that bought this book thinking it's a clinical review of the ramifications of incest will surely be surprised to say the least. The title of 'Daddy' has to tittilate from point one.

This is 'an erotic memoir' written under a pseudonym .. DUUUUHHH ... Aficionados of erotic literature, especially the Victorain classics, would not even bat an eyebrow in reading this book since incest in Victorian times was not only practiced but actually quite common.

The author in this book tells us a story about reuniting with his two estranged daughters, now 21 and 24 after a 20 year separation. He is portrayed as a struggling writer in LA when his daughters, still living with the authors ex in northern California, send him a letter hoping to find him to set up a meeting.

Both girls in their own way seduce daddy and encourage a very sexual and of course incestous relationship. The story is written in a very gentle manner and I as the reader get the distinct impression that it may have been written by a woman. Since the apppreciation of eroticism is in the mind of the beholder this book certainly will appeal to women who may have had a crush on their fathers or on their father figure. Obviously, the three main characters know what they are doing and if there are any self recriminating thoughts of the consequences of their actions they are only described to add realism to the story.

The spice of eroticism must be the fusion of a good story and the reader getting to enjoy the taste of forbidden fruit. In this book the story is paramount and the sex and eroticism is definitely soft core and rates a five star recommendation in my book..... Enjoy

Rating:
Summary: Daddy;an erotic memoir
Review: I have read the book, and it may help to mention that the "girls" are in their 20s, and did not grow up in the presence of this "deplorable man." It is an absolutely beautiful story, well written, thought out, and told. It is not a cattle call for all pedophiles... nothing like that at all. This story is _not_ about children - but adults.

Rating:
Summary: Great read
Review: I loved this book. It gave me a different perspective. You get a little tired always hearing the politically correct views, which just about everyone has (except for the silent majority). The way people harp today about incest reminds me of how people once harped about homosexuality or nakedness. I'm sorry, but while I might disaprove of many things, I cannot say that this person is evil. He is simply honest. Get with it.

Rating:
Summary: Don't Bother
Review: To be sure, this is not a good book. Schmidt overwrites, overanalyzes, and overexplains, providing an effect much like suffocation. Despite being fairly short, this book is a long read--it takes time to slog through Schmidt's self-indulgent excess. He could have excised entire chapters without significantly changing the story. Its sheer, numbing badness makes it easy for me to believe this man is indeed a television writer. Daddy fails as a novel and it fails as erotica.
For what it's worth, I do think this is a memoir, rather than poorly-executed fiction, if only for the rather cynical reason that none of the three main characters changes very much. The elder daughter gains enough self-reliance to hold a job and keep an apartment, but the three of them finish with the intense egocentrism they begin with. As the joke goes, "Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense."