Letters from a Deadbeat Dad and Other Stories: Confessions to a Teenage Daughter and Other Subtitles

It is a long and often painful tale. Don't read it if you are leading a normal, happy life in a functional family, unless you want to know about places where you would never choose to go ¿ places where you wouldn't want anybody to go. Apart from its most obvious intention, as a message from a father to his estranged teenage daughter, this book is directed toward the millions of men (and their families, friends and relatives) who have journeyed through the terrain the story attempts to depict. It is a landscape of America at the beginning of the 21st century, the heart of the greatest empire the world has ever known, which is inhabited by a population living in a culture of hypocrisy and denial, in a society littered with fatherless children and the corpses of broken families. The book attempts to reach out to all men who have ever been defamed as Deadbeat Dads, as the lowliest of social scum in the popular culture, and to all people who have found their strange childhood origins transformed into troubled adult relationships, and who then have sojourned through various levels of hell, in the world of difficult marriages, divorces, child-custody battles, and paternity suits. The message of the book to all such people is that you are not alone, and that there are ways to resist being destroyed. The story is told as the chronologically straightforward memoir of an anonymous man who thinks he might speak for many other people. The narrative is highly subjective and full of closely detailed experience and psychological analysis. Beneath its surface presentation, the individually unique story seeks to validate the pedagogy of 'single case-study analysis.' That which is unique attempts to elucidate an entire class (or two) of cases, in description of several developments that have become major features of the American social landscape. These developments include the explosion of divorces initiated by women, the concomitant expansion of non-custodial fathers' ranks, and the u