Writing Fathers: Auto/biography and Unfulfilled Vocation in Sara Suleri Goodyear's Boys Will be Boys and Hanif Kureishi's My Ear at His Heart

Abstract

This paper analyzes Sara Suleri Goodyear's Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter's Elegy and Hanif Kureishi's My Ear at His Heart: Reading My Father, in the context of current scholarship on relational auto/biography, specifically criticism on narratives of filiation, to explore the ways writers engage their fathers’ stories. The texts share certain characteristics: Both are written after the father's death by biracial English/Pakistani children who are themselves important writers; textual evidence attests to the authors’ awareness of a responsibility to complete their fathers’ unfulfilled dream of literary publication; the emphasis in each of the subtitles of the idea of filiation shows this relationship as the impulse behind the writing of the text. By engaging their fathers’ lives and their fathers’ texts in an auto/biographical project that completes the fathers’ dream of writing and being published, both writers signal their awareness of their moral obligation to do so precisely because it was their fathers who molded them into writers. We perceive a profound connection between the nature of the project, the specific form of the auto/biographical act, and the identity of the author as both child and writer.

Keywords:

• narratives of filiation
• Sara Suleri Goodyear
• Hanif Kureishi
• relational autobiography

Notes

1. I use the term ‘auto/biography,’ as Susanna Egan and Gabrielle Helms explain, to acknowledge the complexity of current work: The slash signals

the broad continuum of life writing discourses that range from writing about the self (auto) to writing about another (biography). That slash also acknowledges that today contemporary auto/biographers increasingly practice, and theorists are recognizing, original and creative approaches to these genres, a combining or blending of genres to produce, for example, the collaborative work or the family memoir, the art installation, the film, or the web site that combine performance of identity with sophisticated levels of irony and full consciousness of theoretical implications. (6–7)

2. Eakin defines the most common form of what he calls the ‘relational life’ as those autobiographies

that feature the decisive impact on the autobiographer of either (1) an entire social environment (a particular kind of family, or a community and its social institutions—schools, churches, and so forth) or (2) key other individuals, usually family members, especially parents. (69)

3. See Eakin, Egan, and Michael M. J. Fischer's ‘Autobiographical Voices (1,2,3) and Mosaic Memory: Experimental Sondages in the (Post)Modern World’ for more perspectives on the relational component to life writing.

4. See my “A task of reclamation”: Subjectivity, Self-Representation, and Textual Formulation in Sara Suleri's Meatless Days’ for a discussion of these issues in Suleri's writing.

5. Kureishi's essay ‘Something Given: Reflections on Writing,’ published in 2002 but written earlier, centers on his father's dream of being a published writer and how his father's ambition fueled his own. Though the essay makes several references to the novels his father wrote and describes his father actually sitting down and writing them, we understand that Kureishi never actually read any of them until just before working on My Ear at His Heart. The essay thus serves as an interesting companion piece to the auto/biography.

6. See Susie Thomas’ article for a discussion of Kureishi's ambivalent thoughts regarding the notion of writing or reading autobiographically and issues such as the legitimacy of the use of biographical information as part of the reading process. She also notes the irony in Kureishi's manner of approaching his father's work in a way that he would object to if used for his own work.