PREFACE

I've been working on the final version of the manuscript for the book, "Dear Harry" in preparation for publication. I decided to add this preface....

PREFACE

This is the book I have been trying to write for my whole life. I have attempted it several times before. It’s there, in a nutshell, in “Aspley Guise”, the first book of poems I published more than 50 years ago. It’s there in a “novel” I wrote and titled simply “M”—and never published. It’s there in a memoir I called “Sticks & Stones.” It’s there, in part, in a memoir I did publish, “While I Am Not Afraid.”

But every one of these efforts left me feeling that much of what I’d wanted to say was left unsaid. They felt too personal, somehow, to be shared. I was always looking for a way to say these things, and never found it to my satisfaction until I stumbled into the idea of writing it all in the form of “letters to my father.” The medium allowed me to be as intimate as I wanted to be, but with my father serving as a kind of buffer between writer and reader.

I started out with the idea that I wanted to know my father, who had always seemed to be beyond my reach—ironically until after he was dead. But it was not long before I came to understand that what I also wanted was for him to know me.

“Dear Harry” exists as a book because I think I share this longing with almost everyone who ever had a father. I have worked for many years with men and know that many of them, countless really, have suffered in their lives because of absent fathers, fathers addicted to drink, or work, or women, fathers who died young, fathers unable or unwilling to show the love they might have felt. Even those well-intentioned fathers who simply seemed distant or remote to children who needed nothing more than a word of approval or a hug.

I say “men” because I have worked most intimately with them. But I believe it is no different for women with their fathers. And I do believe that there’s a cultural shift taking place that suggests that men are changing. They are becoming more easily attuned to their own feelings and therefore better fathers, more able to deal with the intimacy that good fatherhood requires.

My hope is that “Dear Harry” will be more than a memoir, more than a matter of one man’s experience, one man’s search; that it will invite fathers and children both to search more deeply in their hearts and become still better fathers to their children and still better children to their fathers. 

Which would make, perhaps, for a better world at a time when that better world is sorely needed by us all.

                                                                                  --- Peter Clothier