Dad Stories

Dad Stories is a flash memoir collection about the small violences that girls face at the hands of fathers who don't know how to raise them, who aren't held accountable or need to know how to raise girls. This collection is about the visceral absence of semi-present fathers and their hollow presence that pervades every moment. The collection as a whole, and each individual piece, contains the struggle of all children with dysfunctional parents-that of loving them despite (and often in spite of) their flaws, anger and hurt at their shortcomings, and the desperate want for them to be better/more. This is the heart of the tension within the collection. Through chronological vignettes, Fontenot asks over and over again how a daughter is supposed to feel about such a father, about such a childhood. She turns this questioning over to readers by writing in the perspectives of each age of experience and challenges readers to come to their own conclusions, to have their own reactions.