My Father's Summers : A Daughter's Memoir

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Summary: Kathi Appelt's poignant collection of eloquent prose poems
Review: The memory of our childhood is like a collection of snap shots that capture not only high points but unrelated odds and ends that are preserved for reasons we can not even suspect any more. An autobiography tries to connect all the dots and provide a smooth narrative flow, filling in gaps the way the scientists in "Jurassic Park" spliced in other genes to make a complete strand of DNA. However, the artificiality of such life stories and the way they lose reality but making all the pieces fit is revealed by Kathi Appelt's "My Father's Summers: A Daughter's Memoir." What we have here are a series of prose poems that provide brief glimpses at the bits and pieces of a life more vividly than would a complete autobiography.

"My Father's Summers" are created for Kathi and her two younger sisters when the absence of her father working half a world away in Arabia turns to a smaller but more devastating move across town to a new life with another woman her sons, suddenly stepbrothers for a little girl who cannot understand what has happened to her family but who can appreciate the emotional pain. Against such stark moments as the whispered insinuations that her mother was not a good wife or the constant connections between life in general and what had happened with her father (e.g., the idea that crabs leave one shell to find another), there are touches of wonder, such as the sweet boy with brown hair and deep brown eyes who made sure Appelt had been kissed before her 16th birthday.

There are a couple dozen black & white family photographs scattered throughout the book, some tied specifically to the prose poems and others just showing Appelt, her sisters and her parents (but, somewhat surprisingly, none of Karen, the best friend of which she often writes). While there is a rough chronological structure to the arrangement of the prose poems, the topics go where memory takes and other tenuous connections take them; at one point the photographs of Appelt are going backwards in time. Memories are unstuck in time.

The description on the front flap of "My Father's Summers" describes it as a "memoir of coming-of-age in Houston, Texas" and sometimes it is difficult to think of it in those terms because the title and the revelation that Appelt's father found a variety of ways of being absent from his daughter's life becomes the dominant element of the book. Even when she does not write explicitly about her father and his absences, he is a presence, even when the death that ends the story is not his own. The poignancy of Appelt's work will have a resonance beyond that for the daughters of divorce or those who grew up in Houston or some similar place, because these remembrances combine the bitter disappointments and unforgettable delights that make up the life of any child.