Sorrowful story of a writer I enjoyed and knew nothing about and the toll it took on his family, told through the eyes of his son. The depiction of the author's childhood in Appalachia seemed horrid growing up at the same time I did. ( )

A helluva book! ( )

When author Chris Offutt's father dies, he is charged with the caretaking of his estate which consists of an extraordinarily large amount (hundreds) of science fiction and fantasy, but mainly pornographic books and comic books written over a course of 50 years. Based on Offutt's description of his relationship with his father growing up, it is a wonder that he grew into a, hopefully, normal human being. Andrew Offutt was obsessed with sexual perversion, bondage, sado-masochism and pornography from a young age and matured into a man - "monster" might be a better word - who expected everybody to kowtow to his needs and wants, who needed to always be the center of attention, and who tolerated nothing that interfered with his view of life. There is no speculation on the author's part as to how his father became this way, which is unfortunate, because I would have liked to have known. Another question paramount to me is how his mother could have allowed her husband to emotionally and mentally mistreat their four children (and herself) like he did, because surely this was a man that should never have had kids or a wife for that matter. Disturbing. ( )

The author knew his father was an incredibly prolific writer, pounding out a stunning amount of Sci-Fi and fantasy through the author's childhood and well into his adulthood. What he did not realize, was the fact that his father also wrote porn and a lot of it, 400-plus books, under different pseudonyms.
I had read a few good reviews of this memoir but I was not prepared for how deep this story goes and how prickly, domineering and unpleasant his relationship with his father went. After his father died, Offutt began to examine his father's archives, trying to understand this talented and very complex man. This led him down some very dark paths, nearly causing him to have a breakdown.

I had not heard of Offutt, but he is an author of several books, including other memoirs and story collections, so his writing chops are solid. I highly recommend this one but beware: there are many unsettling moments, along with some disturbing child abuse, that the author was subjected to. ( )

Officially speaking, Andrew J. Offutt made his living as a moderately-successful author of pulp science fiction. But Andrew had a secret sideline that was more lucrative than space opera; he was also a prolific, pseudonymous creator of hard-core, violent pornography. After his death from alcohol-induced liver disease, his son, author and screenwriter Chris Offutt did everything he could to understand this domineering, emotionally absent man. The younger Offutt's efforts included interviewing his mother, cleaning out his father's long neglected office, and, most significantly, creating a bibliography of his father's extensive archive of published and unpublished pornographic works.

Sadomasochism was more than just a literary specialty for Andrew; it was his obsession. Andrew believed that if he didn't have the release of writing and illustrating shocking stories involving the sexual torture of women, he would have been a serial killer.

The narrative shuttles back and forth between Chris Offutt's childhood and the present day. I found the early chapters about Chris Offutt's east Kentucky childhood more compelling than the later chapters that dealt with his father's literary output. In the later chapters Chris Offutt suddenly stops making smooth transitions between paragraphs, a stylistic quirk that gives the narrative a disjointed quality.

It's not quite as good as I hoped it would be (I had looked forward to this book for months after I listened to an interview with Chris Offutt on NPR), but I do recommend My Father the Pornographer as a sad, dark, poignant story of a father and son. ( )