Dad, Love, Me

“What begins as an excavation of childhood trauma gradually becomes something rarer and more enlightening: an account of what happens when forgiveness arrives only after the parent who most needs it begins losing the ability to understand it… . It’s difficult to read this book without feeling that some redemption and reconciliation–between parents and children, between scarred memory and forgiveness–have become possible.”
–Tas Tobey, The New York Times
“Everything Matthew Quick has written up to this point–all nine best-selling novels–have been prequels to this memoir; a book that should be considered his masterpiece…. Powerful, painful, heart-wrenching, and heart-lifting, Matthew bravely lays bare his heart, soul, and most of all his relationship with his difficult father…. If we could all forgive as Matthew has forgiven his father, Michael, the world would be an entirely different place.”
–The Southern Bookseller Review
“Matthew Quick’s Dad, Love, Me is a masterpiece: funny and devastating, heartbreaking and hopeful, and astonishingly honest about the inheritance of pain. In this unforgettable memoir, Quick turns toward the terrifying father he once had every reason to flee–a deeply complicated man whose dementia diagnosis makes the possibility of repair feel both urgent and nearly impossible. What follows isn’t a tidy story of forgiveness, but something far more powerful: an excavation of masculinity, mental illness, addiction, shame, generational trauma, and the bewildering love between injured fathers and wounded sons. This is a book about the gaping father hunger most men don’t talk about, the family legacies that damage and shape us, and the imperfect grace of trying, before it’s too late, to heal our souls. It will change people’s lives. If you have a father, son, brother, husband–or are one–you need to stop everything and read this. Every page absolutely slayed me and made me think deeply about my own family legacy and our astonishing capacity for repair.”
–Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
“Quick grapples with a fraught relationship with his father, who now suffers from dementia … using a novelist’s skill to home in on particular scenes and to explore their implications… . For all its heavy subject matter, the book has a remarkably light touch and sense of grace… . A poignant account of not-quite-finished business.”
–Kirkus Reviews
“A raw, heart-wrenching memoir, written in the second person as ‘a long overdue letter to my father, ’ Quick explains… . This absorbing book is his thoughtful, painful attempt to heal himself from the deep psychological wounds that have ached within him for decades.”
–AARP Magazine
“I will gobble up any memoir about having a shitty parent… . This memoir is Quick’s first nonfiction work, and a vulnerable, beautiful one at that. The stories are written as retellings addressed to his father, giving us deep insight into the author’s healing while also watching his dad change and open up as a result of dementia.”
–Scary Mommy, Katie McPherson
“It’s an oft-repeated truth of modern psychology: that to be healthy, you have to ‘do the work.’ But at a time when ‘doing the work’ has been trivialized by the online mental health click-machine, it is thrilling to see someone really, honestly doing the work, the very hard work, of compassion, forgiveness, and piercing introspection. Matthew Quick invites us on a profound journey–into childhood, fatherhood, masculinity, and the awareness required to heal after heartbreak. The courage it took to write this book leaves me in awe.”
–Nathan Hill, New York Times bestselling author of The Nix and Wellness
“Almost every man I know is carrying a wound from his father, but most of us will die without ever admitting it. Matthew Quick didn’t. I wish I could’ve read Dad, Love, Me while I was white-knuckling my own father-son mythology–this book will gut you and then, somehow, put you back together. We are taught, as men, that silence is strength and that need is weakness. So we drink. We work. We disappear into the pursuit of wealth and status and whatever else keeps us from feeling the thing we’ve never been given language for: that we are still, underneath all of it, sons who wanted to be seen by our fathers and weren’t. Dad, Love, Me addresses this–precisely, courageously, and without self-pity. Read it. Then call your father. Time is not on your side.”
–Scott Galloway, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Notes on Being a Man
“Dad, Love, Me is a gut punch of a memoir: a history of monstrous masculinity that will knock the wind right out of you. Matthew Quick explores the crushing legacy of having been loved badly–unsteadily at best, violently otherwise–and then turns his prodigious heart toward the painful, ecstatic project of forgiveness. What a gift he has. What a gift this book is.”
–Catherine Newman, New York Times bestselling author of Sandwich and Wreck
“Quick gets personal, delivering a painfully wrought memoir that bravely explores parental abuse, the trap of alcoholism, lifesaving therapy, and the double-edged sword of literary success. I was moved by the depth of Quick’s candor and his impulse to share his story to help other ‘walking wounded’ sons of toxic fathers discover a pathway to forgiveness.”
–Wally Lamb, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The River Is Waiting

Matthew Quick is the New York Times bestselling author of The Silver Linings Playbook, which was made into an Academy Award-winning film. He has written eight other novels, including We Are the Light, a main selection of the Book of the Month Club. His memoir, Dad, Love, Me, was lauded by The New York Times and named an Editors’ Choice.

Quick’s work has been translated into more than thirty languages. It has received a PEN/Hemingway Award Honorable Mention, was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist, a #1 bestseller in Brazil, a Deutscher Jugendliteratur Preis 2016 (German Youth Literature Prize) nominee, and selected by Nancy Pearl as one of Summer’s Best Books for NPR. The Hollywood Reporter has named him one of Hollywood’s 25 Most Powerful Authors.

Matthew lives with his wife, the novelist Alicia Bessette, in Beaufort, South Carolina.

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