A Hard One to Write
Father’s Day was always hard for me. My father and I didn’t get along. Plenty of people carry a complicated version of this holiday, and the honest version is worth saying out loud.Share on X
Father’s Day falls on the third Sunday in June. For a lot of people it’s simple gratitude. For me it never was.
My father and I didn’t get along. He had anger issues, and he was abusive. I marked Father’s Day because I felt I had to, but I did it grudgingly, and I’m not going to dress that up into something warmer than it was. I’ve written about him at length in My Life in Crazytown, the memoir of my childhood, and one of the things I decided early in that book was that I wouldn’t give it a fake forgiveness arc.
The truth didn’t come with a neat bow, so I didn’t tie one on it.
I bring this up because a lot of people dread this holiday, and almost nobody says so. The cards and the ads assume one kind of father. Plenty of people had another kind. If that’s you, you’re not alone, and you’re not required to feel something you don’t feel.
Why the Hard Stories Get Told Straight
The temptation with a difficult parent is to soften it into a forgiveness arc nobody earned. Resist it. The honest version, edges and all, is the one worth writing.Share on X
Here’s the writing lesson, and it’s the one I care about most. The hard family stories are worth telling, and they’re only worth telling if you tell them straight.
The temptation, always, is to soften. To find the silver lining, to manufacture the redemption, to end on the note where you understand him now and everything is healed. Readers can smell that from a mile away, because most of the time it’s not true. Some relationships don’t resolve. Some damage doesn’t heal into a tidy lesson. A memoir that forces a forgiveness arc onto a story that didn’t earn one is lying, and the lie is what makes it forgettable.
The honest version is harder to write and far better to read. It says: this is what happened, this is what it cost, and no, it didn’t all get fixed. That refusal to pretend is what gives a difficult story its weight.
I wrote Crazytown without a forgiveness arc because the forgiveness wasn’t there, and the book is truer for it. The edges are the point. Sanding them off would have left nothing worth reading.
For Anyone With a Complicated Father
If this holiday is easy and warm for you, good. Celebrate your father, tell him what he means to you, enjoy the day fully. That’s a real gift and worth honoring.
If it’s not easy, you don’t have to perform a feeling you don’t have. You’re allowed to let the day be complicated, or to skip it, or to mark it grudgingly the way I did, without guilt. And if you ever decide to write about it, write the true version. The complicated father, the hard childhood, the things that didn’t resolve.
Told straight, those are some of the most powerful stories there are, because so few people are willing to tell them without flinching. The truth, even the uncomfortable truth, is always the stronger choice on the page.