“And if you gaze long into an abyss,” Nietzsche warned in “Beyond Good and Evil,” “the abyss gazes also into you.”
When Chris Offutt’s father, Andrew J. Offutt, died of alcohol-induced liver failure in the spring of 2013, he left Chris one hell of an abyss to gaze into. Over more than four decades, Andy Offutt had written eighteen hundred pounds of published and unpublished fiction: some sci-fi, some fantasy, the bulk of it pornography written under an array of pseudonyms. In “My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir,” Chris Offutt documents the arduous task of sifting through his father’s archives to uncover the psyche behind the man in whose shadow he grew up. The result is a sharp, searching memoir of influence and inheritance.
Chris Offutt is the acclaimed author of two short story collections, one novel, two previous memoirs, and episodes of the TV series “True Blood” and “Weeds.” His father wrote porn in countless genres, including “pirate porn, ghost porn, science fiction porn, vampire porn, historical porn, time-travel porn, secret agent porn, thriller porn, zombie porn, and Atlantis porn.” His most passionate work dealt with sadism. Only the alphabet would ever group these two writers together, and then only when Andy published under his real name. But the further Offutt climbs inside his father’s head, the more their differences recede. In this book’s bravest passages, the son faces his father’s reflection in aspects of his own life and work. Among these are the qualities that unite most writers: the cultivation of solitude, an escapist imagination, a passion for imaginary worlds that can easily slide into obsession and compulsion.
Andrew J. Offutt was a narcissist, a bully, a mean drunk, and almost certainly mentally ill. He cared more for the elaborate, fetishized worlds he built at his typewriter than for the family he allegedly wrote to support. He nursed one porn pseudonym, John Cleve, into a full-fledged alter ego complete with his own wardrobe and name tag at conventions. A less mature writer might have sketched Andy as a caricature to join the pantheon of memoir monster parents. Offutt does the much harder work of understanding his father without either demonizing or absolving. In Offutt’s clear-eyed vision, his father’s hubris is frequently enraging, sometimes pitiable, and often hilarious.
“My Father, the Pornographer” is divided into 31 short chapters, making room for quick breathers from Andy Offutt’s mountain of porn. Offutt treats the reader to a history of industry and corruption in his hometown of Haldeman, Kentucky, a meditation on suicide, a boy’s failed attempt to join the army, and scenes from a childhood split between Appalachia’s wooded hills and the nascent subculture of sci-fi conventions. Most chapters end with a short, unadorned declarative sentence that lands like a punch in the throat, gathering all the emotional weight preceding it.
Despite the book’s provocative premise, Offutt mostly holds out on the reader’s prurient interest in his father’s work. He focuses more on Andy’s mentality than on his actual prose. This was a man who enforced such a rigid code of silence in the house where he wrote that his son was driven outside to find solace in the company of rocks and trees; who devoted his life to sadomasochistic fantasies yet could not muster the courage to explain “the birds and the bees” to his children. This is a far more arresting story than anything Andy Offutt ever put on paper (though when Offutt does pause to share his father’s material, the effect is sometimes overwhelming). One wonders how Chris Offutt survived such a father to become the writer he is now. Reading his subtle, devastating prose, one also suspects it could not have happened any other way.
