According to writer Czeslaw Milosz, “When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.” Novelist and screenwriter Matthew Quick’s memoir, DAD, LOVE, ME --- the story of his decades-long fraught relationship with his father, Michael --- provides an extended case study of that maxim’s insight and its limitations. It illuminates both the depths of one man’s lifelong pain and the redemptive power of the written word. 

Though he’s published nine novels, Quick is best known for his first, THE SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK, which was transformed into a 2012 movie starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence that garnered eight Academy Award nominations. Sadly, that massive hit didn’t translate into a string of literary and film successes for Quick. On the contrary, it wasn’t too many years later that he spiraled into a sustained period of alcoholism, occasional panic attacks and writer’s block.

"In addition to unearthing the story of his own life with candor and grace, Matthew Quick has admirably fulfilled his goal of offering a frank account simultaneously tinged with optimism that may serve as inspiration for other sons and fathers to achieve some sort of reconciliation before their own opportunities to do that disappear."

As Quick reveals in this memoir, written in the form of an extended letter to his father, the roots of his afflictions lay in his toxic relationship with a man who rose from modest circumstances to a career in the banking business, and ended it as a high-level executive of a publicly traded bank. Michael Quick’s abuse only rarely took physical form. Instead, he engaged in a relentless verbal assault against the eldest of his three children, constantly demeaning him for everything from his career choice, to his weight, to his lack of appreciation for what Michael constantly insisted were his tireless efforts to support the family. What made this behavior especially intolerable was its unpredictability, for as Quick puts it, he “never knew when the gun was going to go off.”

Quick methodically recounts several of their most intense confrontations --- including one encounter at the dinner table that grew violent and a tirade when Michael drove his son back to college on the weekend of his 19th birthday, after Quick's girlfriend ended their relationship. These vivid scenes make for painful reading, as one viscerally experiences the harm being inflicted by a heedless, self-absorbed father on a son who lacked the psychological tools to understand fully or defend himself against what was happening. Michael's “constant inability to be what I needed,” Quick writes, “made me hate you.”

Quick credits a therapist he nicknames Zeus (an allusion to the myth of the rebirth of Dionysus) for guiding him through more than 700 hours of Jungian analysis that offered him “a proper psychological relationship” with his past and enabled him to gain some insight into the reasons for his father’s emotional cruelty. In part, they lay in Michael's own upbringing by Quick’s grandfather --- a World War II combat veteran who, paradoxically, often was (with one striking exception) a source of comfort and support to his grandson --- and the actions of an older brother who was a less than ideal masculine role model. Quick takes the reader deep into these therapeutic encounters, all of which were on Zoom, offering a glimpse of the variety of techniques --- including active imagination and Quick's own writing --- that Zeus employs to burrow into the heart of his patient’s troubled psyche. 

What makes DAD, LOVE, ME especially poignant is that, though he’s a main character, Michael Quick will never be able to read the book. Shortly after Michael retired from his banking job, he began to exhibit signs of dementia. By 2024, when Quick began writing the memoir with his mother's full permission, Michael's disease had progressed to the point where meaningful interaction with his son about their shared past no longer was possible, even as their relationship became more tender in the present. Because of that, Quick realized that he needed to “discard the needy-son mentality and put on the giving-father mentality.” And in that process, he came to understand, for all the healing he had to undergo, that “I am my father, and it's my job to redeem us both.”

In 2023, Quick and his wife, novelist Alicia Bessette, relocated from their home on North Carolina’s Outer Banks to Lady’s Island, South Carolina, near Beaufort, purchasing a house within walking distance of his parents’ retirement home. He offers several sad/funny scenes of caregiving for his father during that time. The relationship reaches an apex of melancholy on Super Bowl Sunday in 2025, when father and son, lifelong passionate Philadelphia Eagles fans, watch their team demolish the Kansas City Chiefs, a victory only one of them is capable of celebrating in the moment. 

Though the elders they portray are markedly different, DAD, LOVE, ME feels like a worthy companion piece to Joe McGinniss, Jr.'s excellent 2025 memoir, DAMAGED PEOPLE, in their shared recognition that the pain inflicted by abusive or neglectful fathers doesn't emerge out of the ether. This is anything but an easy book to read. That's true both for those who have endured parental abuse and those who have experienced the trials of dealing with a loved one suffering from dementia. 

In addition to unearthing the story of his own life with candor and grace, Matthew Quick has admirably fulfilled his goal of offering a frank account simultaneously tinged with optimism that may serve as inspiration for other sons and fathers to achieve some sort of reconciliation before their own opportunities to do that disappear. And in doing so, to amend Czeslaw Milosz's dictum, he reveals that the presence of a writer in the family sometimes offers more healing than hurt.