Editorial Content for My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
When he died in 2013 of acute alcohol-induced cirrhosis, Andrew Offutt left his eldest son in charge of his bizarre legacy: almost a ton of paperback books. The books were written by Andrew over the course of more than 50 years, and the bulk was pornographic.
Chris Offutt had known his father in only a troubled, distant way, even though Andrew’s career as a porn writer had purportedly started as a financial venture when Chris needed expensive orthodontic work as a teenager. His father’s writing was done at home, in strict silence (the boy once got in trouble for urinating too loudly in the bathroom across from his father’s office). Styling himself as possibly mentally ill, with sadistic tendencies, Andrew expressed more dominance than fatherliness. When Chris returned to the family home to help his widowed mother move out, secrets about Andrew began falling into place.
"Both personal memoir and subjective biography, MY FATHER, THE PORNOGRAPHER stands as an offbeat but reasoned testament to the writer’s craft, as practiced by one especially lonely, haunted soul."
Chris recalls that the only vacations the family took were to “cons” --- conventions of fans and composers of sci-fi, western and other pornographic genres for which Andrew, often using pseudonyms, wrote avidly. For the cons, Andrew and his wife would dress in fetishistic costumes, and during the events, Andrew would not speak to his children, instead assuming one of his many personae, the best known being “John Cleve.” Something like an alter ego, Cleve (a take-off on John Cleland, author of the notorious Victorian sex novel FANNY HILL) churned out a mass of instantly profitable sleaze, culminating in a 19-book series for Playboy Press.
Chris found among his father’s effects lengthy lists of descriptions --- of breasts, orgasms, kisses and pain: “Dad was like Henry Ford applying principles of assembly-line production with premade parts…working alone, Dad could write a book in three days.” Poring over this dark material had a mind-numbing effect on Chris; he shut himself off for a time as he attempted to understand, perhaps justify, his father’s fascination with lust, cruelty and fear.
There are among the grim details of Andrew’s life as a pornographer a few redeeming sparks. He did, after all, support his wife and children with the output of his acute, if acerbic and disturbed, intellect. And Chris found a letter indicating that his father had once sent someone a copy of one of Chris’ books, an act of professional and paternal generosity that Chris would not have imagined Andrew capable of. Andrew voluntarily “resigned” from the Catholic faith rather than be considered “lapsed,” but in his last conversation with Chris, he opined that there may be an afterlife.
Both personal memoir and subjective biography, MY FATHER, THE PORNOGRAPHER stands as an offbeat but reasoned testament to the writer’s craft, as practiced by one especially lonely, haunted soul.
Teaser
When Andrew Offutt died, his son, Chris, inherited a desk, a rifle and 1,800 pounds of porn. Andrew had been considered the “king of 20th century smut,” a career that began as a strategy to pay for his son’s orthodontic needs and soon took on a life of its own, peaking during the ’70s when the commercial popularity of the erotic novel was at its height. Over one long summer in his hometown, helping his mother move out of the house, Chris began to examine his deceased father’s possessions and realized he finally had an opportunity to come to grips with the mercurial man he always feared but never understood.
Promo
When Andrew Offutt died, his son, Chris, inherited a desk, a rifle and 1,800 pounds of porn. Andrew had been considered the “king of 20th century smut,” a career that began as a strategy to pay for his son’s orthodontic needs and soon took on a life of its own, peaking during the ’70s when the commercial popularity of the erotic novel was at its height. Over one long summer in his hometown, helping his mother move out of the house, Chris began to examine his deceased father’s possessions and realized he finally had an opportunity to come to grips with the mercurial man he always feared but never understood.
About the Book
In “one of the most sensitive, nuanced examinations of father and son relationships” (The Boston Globe), award-winning writer Chris Offutt struggles to understand his recently deceased father, based on his reading of the 400-plus novels his father --- a well-known writer of pornography in the 1970s and '80s --- left him in his will.
Andrew Offutt was considered the “king of twentieth-century smut,” with a writing career that began as a strategy to pay for his son’s orthodontic needs and soon took on a life of its own, peaking during the 1970s when the commercial popularity of the erotic novel reached its height. With his dutiful wife serving as typist, Andrew wrote from their home in the Kentucky hills, locked away in an office no one dared intrude upon. In this fashion he wrote more than four hundred novels, including pirate porn, ghost porn, zombie porn and secret agent porn. The more he wrote, the more intense his ambition became and the more difficult it was for his children to be part of his world.
Over the long summer of 2013, his son, Chris, returned to his hometown to help his now widowed mother move out of his childhood home. As he began to examine his father’s manuscripts and memorabilia, journals and letters, he realized he finally had an opportunity to gain insight into the difficult, mercurial, sometimes cruel man he’d loved and feared in equal measure. Only in his father’s absence could he truly make sense of the man and his legacy.
In MY FATHER, THE PORNOGRAPHER, Offutt takes us on the journey with him, reading his father’s prodigious literary output as both a critic and as a son seeking answers. He “enters the darkest and most mysterious of places --- the cave of a monstrous enigma named Andrew J. Offutt --- armed with nothing but his own restless curiosity. Spoiler alert: He makes it out alive, walking into the daylight to bring us a deeper, funnier, more tender and more heartbroken truth --- and his masterpiece” (Michael Chabon).
Audiobook available, read by Jonathan Yen
