Freestyle Fatherhood

Taylor Antrim speaks with Simon Carr about his moving memoir, The Boys Are Back, and how he improvised raising his two sons after his wife died.

As far as I’m concerned the American father became self-aware on a Saturday in the summer of 1986—the moment I spotted Bill Cosby’s Fatherhood surfing a stack of Clive Cussler paperbacks on my dad’s reading table. Huh? I remember thinking queasily.

Back then such a thing was novel; today you could fill a manly, hand-hewn shelf with dad books. From the gravely sincere (The Joy of Fatherhood) to the somewhat less so (Daddy Needs a Drink), there’s a how-to book/memoir/essay collection for every befuddled new father. Michael Lewis’ Home Game and Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs are only two of the most recent entries in the field.

“My children always obey me. And the reason is that I find out what it is they want to do and then advise them very strongly to do it.”

But for my money, the best of the bunch is The Boys Are Back, a decade-old memoir by one of Britain’s most barbed political columnists, Simon Carr of The Independent. It’s been published in the U.S. for the first time, thanks to Miramax’s slightly treacly adaptation starring Clive Owen (whose grounded, affecting performance is the reason to see the film). The book is a heartbreaking and very funny account of Carr’s attempt to single-parent his two sons while living in New Zealand after the sudden death of his second wife. Here is fathering at its most improvisational. “We are a father and two sons living in a household without women,” Carr writes. “We are like an experiment in a satellite, free of normal earthly influences (like guilt, and bleach, and sock drawers).”

The book is an antidote to the current trend toward hyperactive parenting. Tired of policing his 5-year-old son Alexander, Carr opts for a policy of Just Say Yes. Want to ride your bike in the house? Yes. Want to cannonball into the hotel bathtub? Yes.

“Allowing children their space,” says Carr, via phone from Manchester, England, where he’s covering the Conservative Party convention for The Independent, “that’s our peculiar gift to the world, isn’t it?”

The Boys Are Back. By Simon Carr. 240 pages. Vintage. $14. He means fathers, men in general, whom he celebrates quite irrepressibly in his book. “There are very few all-male households around,” he writes. “There are no rules, no precedents. Being statistically insignificant, Alexander and I had no role models, we had no peer pressure. But we were male. That was one thing in our favor. At least we were male so we could do anything we wanted.”

This makes for quite a messy house—and more than a few father-son spats. Carr is candid in the book about the emotional chaos that characterized life without women. “That’s the terrible thing about being a solo parent,” he tells me. “You’re both having these terrible moods, and if they coincide you need someone else to act as a circuit breaker. A woman would say, stop arguing you two. You’re both talking about the same thing.”

Carr is a brilliantly articulate stylist—verbal communication is another matter. He and his wife Susie hid the fact of her terminal cancer from their son Alexander right until the end. “It was a disastrous decision,” Carr tells me. “You’re practicing this common deception, creating this delusion, this hallucination almost, that everything is fine.” The pages in the memoir recounting Susie’s final days are excruciatingly moving. Finally, Carr must gather the courage to level with Alexander, age 5, and the boy’s confusion is palpable: “When?” he asks. “Will she die by dinner time? Will she die by bedtime? Will she die by breakfast?”