Why Fathers Cry at Night
A Memoir in Love Poems, Letters, Recipes, and Remembrances
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
This powerful memoir from a #1 New York Times bestselling author and Newbery Medalist features poetry, letters, recipes, and other personal artifacts that provide an intimate look into his life and the loved ones he shares it with.
In an intimate and non-traditional (or "new-fashioned") memoir, Kwame Alexander shares snapshots of a man learning how to love. He takes us through stories of his parents: from being awkward newlyweds in the sticky Chicago summer of 1967, to the sometimes-confusing ways they showed their love to each other, and for him. He explores his own relationships—his difficulties as a newly wedded, 22-year-old father, and the precariousness of his early marriage working in a jazz club with his second wife. Alexander attempts to deal with the unravelling of his marriage and the grief of his mother's recent passing while sharing the solace he found in learning how to perfect her famous fried chicken dish. With an open heart, Alexander weaves together memories of his past to try and understand his greatest love: his daughters.
Full of heartfelt reminisces, family recipes, love poems, and personal letters, Why Fathers Cry at Night inspires bravery and vulnerability in every reader who has experienced the reckless passion, heartbreak, failure, and joy that define the whirlwind woes and wonders of love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this heartfelt memoir, Newbery medalist Alexander (Rebound) churns on what he has learned—and is still learning—about love. He traces his model for romance to his parents, who taught him to "use his words," but were rarely affectionate and lived apart for decades. He shares hard-won lessons from the painful dissolution of his own marriages and his grief not only for those relationships but also for the questions he became too afraid to ask his father after his mother's death. Finally, he turns to his daughters and confronts the difficulty of embracing solitude as they grow up and away from the family home. Interleaved through these reflections are sensuous memories of meals and music, from cracking a $250 beer with poet Nikki Giovanni to reverse engineering his mother's fried chicken recipe after she died. Alexander observes that "we sometimes find poems in the strangest and most uncomfortable places," and, indeed, this candid and courageous work finds poetry in places both ordinary and extraordinary. It's a quiet triumph.
