Dad, Love, Me - by Matthew Quick (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE - Written in the form of a letter to his ailing father, this debut memoir from the bestselling author of The Silver Linings Playbook explores the complicated burden of caring for an abusive parent who is dying--here is Matthew Quick's most personal and potent work to date.

"This book will gut you and then, somehow, put you back together." --Scott Galloway - "Dad, Love, Me is a masterpiece....It will change people's lives." --Lori Gottlieb - "A gut punch of a memoir...What a gift this book is." --Catherine Newman - "For all its heavy subject matter, the book has a remarkably light touch and sense of grace." --Kirkus Reviews

"What begins as an excavation of childhood trauma gradually becomes something rarer and more enlightening: an account of what happens when forgiveness arrives only after the parent who most needs it begins losing the ability to understand it....It's difficult to read this book without feeling that some redemption and reconciliation--between parents and children, between scarred memory and forgiveness--have become possible." --The New York Times

On the surface, Matthew Quick seemed to have it all--a loving wife, a thriving career as a novelist, and a beautiful home. He'd traveled all over the world advocating for mental health awareness, standing before crowds as a success story. But secretly, he was depressed and some days, he didn't want to live.

Years earlier, when he first told his father he wanted to be a novelist, the response was immediate and brutal: "Idiot!" That voice--angry and belittling--would echo through Quick's mind for years. He channeled his pain into his debut novel, The Silver Linings Playbook, crafting a complex father-son dynamic drawn straight from his own life. The book became a New York Times bestseller and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence. Still, the approval Quick longed for never came. His father remained cold and withholding. The deeper the rift between them grew, the deeper Quick sank into anxiety and addiction.

In this book, Quick takes readers deep into his psyche, as he wrestles with both his own mental health and his father's cognitive decline. A health scare finally forces Quick to get sober, but then, overcome by creative paralysis, writer's block threatens to end his career. The blank page is unbearable. As his desperation for healing peaks, Quick turns to a Jungian analyst he nicknames "Zeus." In the safety of analysis, as Quick's repressed pain and shame surface, he finally cracks. Just as he is putting himself back together, his father is diagnosed with dementia.

Suddenly, the clock is ticking. If there is ever going to be reconciliation, it has to happen now. Quick and his wife pack up their lives in coastal North Carolina, drive eight hours, and move into a house just around the corner from Quick's parents, on an island right outside of Beaufort, South Carolina. There, as his father slips further and further away, Quick races to make a healing connection.

Dad, Love, Me is Quick's raw, vulnerable, and deeply moving account of what it means to forgive a parent who never really knew how to love you. It's about wounds that never fully heal, and the power of showing up anyway. This beautifully brave and life-affirming memoir is a must read for anyone who has been starved of love but wants to keep loving anyway.

Review Quotes

"What begins as an excavation of childhood trauma gradually becomes something rarer and more enlightening: an account of what happens when forgiveness arrives only after the parent who most needs it begins losing the ability to understand it. . . . It's difficult to read this book without feeling that some redemption and reconciliation--between parents and children, between scarred memory and forgiveness--have become possible."
--Tas Tobey, The New York Times

"Everything Matthew Quick has written up to this point--all nine best-selling novels--have been prequels to this memoir; a book that should be considered his masterpiece.... Powerful, painful, heart-wrenching, and heart-lifting, Matthew bravely lays bare his heart, soul, and most of all his relationship with his difficult father.... If we could all forgive as Matthew has forgiven his father, Michael, the world would be an entirely different place."
--The Southern Bookseller Review

"Matthew Quick's Dad, Love, Me is a masterpiece: funny and devastating, heartbreaking and hopeful, and astonishingly honest about the inheritance of pain. In this unforgettable memoir, Quick turns toward the terrifying father he once had every reason to flee--a deeply complicated man whose dementia diagnosis makes the possibility of repair feel both urgent and nearly impossible. What follows isn't a tidy story of forgiveness, but something far more powerful: an excavation of masculinity, mental illness, addiction, shame, generational trauma, and the bewildering love between injured fathers and wounded sons. This is a book about the gaping father hunger most men don't talk about, the family legacies that damage and shape us, and the imperfect grace of trying, before it's too late, to heal our souls. It will change people's lives. If you have a father, son, brother, husband--or are one--you need to stop everything and read this. Every page absolutely slayed me and made me think deeply about my own family legacy and our astonishing capacity for repair."
--Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

"Quick grapples with a fraught relationship with his father, who now suffers from dementia . . . using a novelist's skill to home in on particular scenes and to explore their implications. . . . For all its heavy subject matter, the book has a remarkably light touch and sense of grace. . . . A poignant account of not-quite-finished business."
--Kirkus Reviews

"A raw, heart-wrenching memoir, written in the second person as 'a long overdue letter to my father, ' Quick explains. . . . This absorbing book is his thoughtful, painful attempt to heal himself from the deep psychological wounds that have ached within him for decades."
--AARP Magazine

"I will gobble up any memoir about having a shitty parent. . . . This memoir is Quick's first nonfiction work, and a vulnerable, beautiful one at that. The stories are written as retellings addressed to his father, giving us deep insight into the author's healing while also watching his dad change and open up as a result of dementia."
--Scary Mommy, Katie McPherson

"It's an oft-repeated truth of modern psychology: that to be healthy, you have to 'do the work.' But at a time when 'doing the work' has been trivialized by the online mental health click-machine, it is thrilling to see someone really, honestly doing the work, the very hard work, of compassion, forgiveness, and piercing introspection. Matthew Quick invites us on a profound journey--into childhood, fatherhood, masculinity, and the awareness required to heal after heartbreak. The courage it took to write this book leaves me in awe."
--Nathan Hill, New York Times bestselling author of The Nix and Wellness

"Almost every man I know is carrying a wound from his father, but most of us will die without ever admitting it. Matthew Quick didn't. I wish I could've read Dad, Love, Me while I was white-knuckling my own father-son mythology--this book will gut you and then, somehow, put you back together. We are taught, as men, that silence is strength and that need is weakness. So we drink. We work. We disappear into the pursuit of wealth and status and whatever else keeps us from feeling the thing we've never been given language for: that we are still, underneath all of it, sons who wanted to be seen by our fathers and weren't. Dad, Love, Me addresses this--precisely, courageously, and without self-pity. Read it. Then call your father. Time is not on your side."
--Scott Galloway, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Notes on Being a Man

"Dad, Love, Me is a gut punch of a memoir: a history of monstrous masculinity that will knock the wind right out of you. Matthew Quick explores the crushing legacy of having been loved badly--unsteadily at best, violently otherwise--and then turns his prodigious heart toward the painful, ecstatic project of forgiveness. What a gift he has. What a gift this book is."
--Catherine Newman, New York Times bestselling author of Sandwich and Wreck

"Quick gets personal, delivering a painfully wrought memoir that bravely explores parental abuse, the trap of alcoholism, lifesaving therapy, and the double-edged sword of literary success. I was moved by the depth of Quick's candor and his impulse to share his story to help other 'walking wounded' sons of toxic fathers discover a pathway to forgiveness."
--Wally Lamb, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The River Is Waiting

About the Author

Matthew Quick is the New York Times bestselling author of The Silver Linings Playbook, which was made into an Academy Award-winning film; eight other novels, including We Are the Light, a main selection of the Book of the Month Club; and the memoir, Dad, Love, Me, which The New York Times lauded and named an Editors' Choice. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, received a PEN/Hemingway Award Honorable Mention, was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, a #1 bestseller in Brazil, a Deutscher Jugendliteratur Preis 2016 (German Youth Literature Prize) nominee, and selected by Nancy Pearl as one of Summer's Best Books for NPR. The Hollywood Reporter has named him one of Hollywood's 25 Most Powerful Authors. Matthew lives with his wife, the novelist Alicia Bessette, in Beaufort, South Carolina.