Tell Me about Your Bad Guys - (American Lives) by Michael Dowdy (Paperback)

About the Book

Combining lyric essay, memoir, and cultural critique, Michael Dowdy's meditations on fathering take his daughter's unruly questions as a guide, seeking a language to match his desire to be an antipatriarchal father.

Book Synopsis

Michael Dowdy perceives the world as a poet, one with an anxiety disorder. As a result he has rarely experienced fathering or his relationship with his daughter, A, as a linear narrative. Rather, his impressions of fathering coalesce in encounters with the conditions of our time, producing intense flashes of awareness and emotion. Critiquing his own fathering practices, Dowdy's essays move between simplicity--being present for his daughter--and complexity--considering the harrowing present of entrenched misogyny, school shootings, climate change, and other threats to childing and fathering with love, optimism, and joy.

The essays in Tell Me about Your Bad Guys do not provide easy answers. They follow instead an interrogative mode, guided by A's unruly questions and Dowdy's desire to avoid fatherhood literature's traps: false modesty, antic ineptitude, and defensive clowning. This means understanding fathering not as an ironclad identity or a cohesive story but as a process of trial and error, self-reflection, and radical openness. With measures of dark humor, the essays take seriously the literary, material, and political stakes of fathering and in doing so challenge patriarchal norms and one-dimensional accounts of fatherhood.

Review Quotes

"A precise and provocative look into one engaged and meticulously self-analytical individual's experience of being a parent."--Margaret Quamme, Booklist-- (3/11/2025 12:00:00 AM)

"In Tell Me about Your Bad Guys Michael Dowdy sets out to write a lyrical and critical book about fathers, fathering, and raising a daughter in the Anthropocene. He accomplishes this task with bravery and clarity, but his engaging and powerful book does much more. Through an intricate weaving of poetry, literary sleuthing, personal history, and ecocriticism, Dowdy ingeniously extends genre boundaries to allow us to see how, in the right hands, poignant discussions of vulnerability, money, race, economics, and our very own survival can all come together as art to ask the most difficult questions about who we are and how we live in a world that is always destroying itself."--Daniel Borzutzky, National Book Award-winning author of The Performance of Becoming Human

"In Michael Dowdy's superb essay collection Tell Me about Your Bad Guys, a father thinks through what it means to raise a child while reckoning with all that is terrifying and broken in this world. Here we bear witness to the tender intimacy between parent and child, which simultaneously never lets us look away from climate change, gun violence, the migrant crisis, and more. These agile, moving investigations of how to love and think are a must-read for anyone trying to care for another in a violent world, which is to say, everyone."--Tessa Fontaine, author of The Red Grove

"Many fatherhood-themed books are heavily memoiristic, telling specific stories and charting a linear narrative forward. Tell Me about Your Bad Guys distinguishes itself by being more inward-turning and experimenting with form. It raises questions about those more traditional renderings of fatherhood by revealing the complexity that often gets blurred out in order to produce a cogent narrative. The essays do more than tell stories--they engage the larger questions of our time and do so with an evocative style."--Steve Edwards, author of Breaking into the Backcountry

About the Author

Michael Dowdy is a professor of English at Villanova University. He is the author or editor of several books, including Urbilly: Poems and American Poets in the 21st Century: The Poetics of Social Engagement, co-edited with Claudia Rankine.