My Father's Son

A Memoir

Taylor Plimpton

A humorous and big-hearted exploration of the author's relationship with his father, George Plimpton, who remains one of the most beloved figures in American letters.

In My Father’s Son, lauded memoirist Taylor Plimpton examines the whirlwind of coming-of-age with style, wit, and warmth. It’s not always so simple growing up in the shadow of a parent—perhaps especially when that parent happens to be a bestselling author, curator of one of the world’s great cultural institutions, an actor in several Oscar-winning films, and maybe the closest person we ever had to a real-life Forrest Gump: How can a son find his own place in the world with all that hanging over him? And perhaps even more relevant, how on earth is he supposed to write a book about a father who was a great literary master himself?

Fearlessly, My Father's Son cuts straight to the very center of the great love—and great struggle—inherent in every parent-child relationship. Along the way, Taylor offers glimpses into his own unusual life—from his childhood days of playing football with literary greats like Peter Matthiessen and James Salter to an adulthood that has included shooting his father’s ashes into the sky in a fireworks show—creating a prismatic narrative that still manages to captures the intimate yet universal theme of fathers and sons.

With refreshing honesty and keen insight, Taylor investigates not just his relationship with his famous father and his fiercely beautiful mother, but also his son, Ollie, a spirited young soul with the same delight in his eyes as the grandfather he never had a chance to meet. And now that he’s become a dad himself, the author is forced to grapple with more acute questions: How can he himself show up as a parent when his own parents were often absent? Can he become a good father even though his own father sometimes just wasn’t?

George Plimpton would have turned 100 on March 18th, 2027. Penned with deep love and yes, even a certain sense of awe, Plimpton's narrative is a celebration of one of the most extraordinary cultural icons in memory—though not only as a celebrity and literary figure, but as a father, and as a man. In this way, it offers a profoundly personal interrogation of essential matters all mothers and fathers inevitably wrestle with: What is it to be a good parent? And perhaps most crucially, can you somehow become a better parent to your child than your parents were to you?

Taylor Plimpton is the author of Notes from the Night: A Life After Dark and the co-editor of The Dreaded Feast: Writers on Enduring the Holidays. He regularly contributes to Sports Illustrated, Town & Country, Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, The New Yorker, A Public Space, The Paris Review Daily, The Rumpus, and many other periodicals. His nonfiction pieces have been named “Notable Essays” in Best American Essays for several years, and he works as an editor and writing professor.

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Endorsements & Reviews

Praise for Taylor Plimpton

"Transcending its subject matter, Plimpton's prose holds the reader with its odd wistful mix of naïveté and insight, honesty and generosity of spirit, graced throughout by the high quality of its unadorned writing—not obvious at first because it is simple, drawing no attention to itself. A real accomplishment." Peter Matthiessen

"Filled with beautiful sentences, comedic self-deprecation, a watchful eye, and a questioning heart." Jonathan Ames

"This clear-eyed, touching, irresistible account belongs somewhere in with Kerouac, Jay McInerney, and J.D. Salinger."
James Salter

"Knight Errant Taylor Plimpton has written a very funny, insightful, honest, wistful and intensely personal book." Jay McInerney