My Father, Dancing

Eight stories about relationships between men and women--but especially between fathers and daughters--in a beautiful debut from Bliss Broyard.

The fathers in Broyard's collection are charismatic, seductive, often brilliant men who are large in the world and even larger in the home, irresistible but also harmful, beautiful but not benign. Their daughters veer wildly between naive longing--for attention, for connection, for assurance--and cool indifference. They learn to reflect their fathers' light, often at the expense of their own.

In spare, unsentimental prose, Broyard captures the passages of daughters, both as young girls and as grown the early lessons girls absorb through their fathers--their first male audience--and the secrets girls keep as they test their own desires; the dislocation of discovering, and identifying with, a parent's infidelity; the struggle to escape from familial roles and the unyielding impulse to re-create them. From the perplexity of first kisses and first love to the fierce, joyless abandon of casual sex; from the equivocal attachments of marriages and families to the pure and inconsolable grief of love and mourning so poignantly depicted in the collection's title story, the stories in My Father, Dancing chronicle the never-ending dance between fathers and their daughters, and the many awakenings of girls and women.