When I am asked, What was it like living with your father? My tongue swells up and I squeak out words like, thrilling or complicated. I've given the question a lot of serious thought and I have a good answer: It was like living with an elephant for 15 years that was trying to give birth to something twice its size.
Darling, your father is going to be famous someday. People will say his books are dirty, but they are truthful books because people in real life use dirty words. I'll never forget my mother telling me this. Her tone was earnest and it scared me. I must have been 8 or 9. My heart was heavy with this news, so I shared it with a couple of my friends at school, My dad is going to be famous for writing dirty books!
Starting at around age, 10, my dad would occasionally give me something he had written to read, which I did with some annoyance and trepidation. He was never far away and would come running into the room if I laughed. He had to know exactly what it was that made me laugh. Once it was his description of a man who talked as if he had a paper asshole. There were enough farts and words like fugging to keep any 10 year old laughing. Needless to say, his hovering expectations put me off of reading for a while.
How my father ever got any writing done at all in the years that I lived with him, I'll never understand. There were six kids under his roof, all boys except for my sister and me. I was the baby and I cried all the time. My dad also had to deal with four boys who knew where to get gunpowder, cherry bombs and later on, exciting hallucinogens from the Amazon Rain Forest. My sister became a member of a gang called The Herd, consisting of dozens of lovely and daring young women.
Between all the explosives, and The Herd, the Vonnegut house was the most popular house in town. Friends and friends of friends were always there and never went home. They guzzled our milk and devoured whatever new-fangled food inventions my mother found irresistible at the A&P. When my mother wasn't guarding my father's study door she was out food shopping. When she pulled into the driveway, she would lean on the horn until we came out to unload the bags and bags of groceries. It's a mystery to me why my father never came steaming out of his study when she honked like that, the driveway being right next to his study. Such intrusions into his writing life were constant; cherry bombs set off much too close to his study window, and the endless thwacking sound of Frisbee's and whiffle balls hitting the outer walls of his studio, year after year.
My father kept standard, nine to five working hours. In those hours my father became a mumbling ghost to all of us. There could be 10 of us sitting at the kitchen table and he'd lumber in, slather a piece of pumpernickel bread with butter and, while mumbling between bites, cock his head from side to side, contort his face from a smile into a grimace, finishing with a chuckle. Hardly did he ever acknowledge us. But, there were rare occasions when he'd unexpectedly stop me, look me square in the eye and impart a lesson such as, The unstructured life is not worth living, or, Why is that table a table? Because it was structured that way! I knew my father was not an ordinary man.
I have tried hard to keep my father as just my father so, for long periods, I avoided reading his books. Reading my father's books caused me to hyperventilate. The last time I read Slaughterhouse-Five, it wasn't long before I was sputtering at the pages, thinking, My fugging father wrote this? I have spent no small amount of time trying to square myself with this fact, as I feel embarrassingly ordinary.
Full piece at HuffPost
Darling, your father is going to be famous someday. People will say his books are dirty, but they are truthful books because people in real life use dirty words. I'll never forget my mother telling me this. Her tone was earnest and it scared me. I must have been 8 or 9. My heart was heavy with this news, so I shared it with a couple of my friends at school, My dad is going to be famous for writing dirty books!
Starting at around age, 10, my dad would occasionally give me something he had written to read, which I did with some annoyance and trepidation. He was never far away and would come running into the room if I laughed. He had to know exactly what it was that made me laugh. Once it was his description of a man who talked as if he had a paper asshole. There were enough farts and words like fugging to keep any 10 year old laughing. Needless to say, his hovering expectations put me off of reading for a while.
How my father ever got any writing done at all in the years that I lived with him, I'll never understand. There were six kids under his roof, all boys except for my sister and me. I was the baby and I cried all the time. My dad also had to deal with four boys who knew where to get gunpowder, cherry bombs and later on, exciting hallucinogens from the Amazon Rain Forest. My sister became a member of a gang called The Herd, consisting of dozens of lovely and daring young women.
Between all the explosives, and The Herd, the Vonnegut house was the most popular house in town. Friends and friends of friends were always there and never went home. They guzzled our milk and devoured whatever new-fangled food inventions my mother found irresistible at the A&P. When my mother wasn't guarding my father's study door she was out food shopping. When she pulled into the driveway, she would lean on the horn until we came out to unload the bags and bags of groceries. It's a mystery to me why my father never came steaming out of his study when she honked like that, the driveway being right next to his study. Such intrusions into his writing life were constant; cherry bombs set off much too close to his study window, and the endless thwacking sound of Frisbee's and whiffle balls hitting the outer walls of his studio, year after year.
My father kept standard, nine to five working hours. In those hours my father became a mumbling ghost to all of us. There could be 10 of us sitting at the kitchen table and he'd lumber in, slather a piece of pumpernickel bread with butter and, while mumbling between bites, cock his head from side to side, contort his face from a smile into a grimace, finishing with a chuckle. Hardly did he ever acknowledge us. But, there were rare occasions when he'd unexpectedly stop me, look me square in the eye and impart a lesson such as, The unstructured life is not worth living, or, Why is that table a table? Because it was structured that way! I knew my father was not an ordinary man.
I have tried hard to keep my father as just my father so, for long periods, I avoided reading his books. Reading my father's books caused me to hyperventilate. The last time I read Slaughterhouse-Five, it wasn't long before I was sputtering at the pages, thinking, My fugging father wrote this? I have spent no small amount of time trying to square myself with this fact, as I feel embarrassingly ordinary.Full piece at HuffPost
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