My Father’s List Book Q&A

How did you find your dad’s list?

My husband, Steven, and I were visiting my brother, Dave, in his new house. He’d found the list while unpacking and put it aside to show me. Though we found out later that my mom had known about it, neither of us knew that it existed. For my brother’s wedding, my sister-in-law framed the list and gave it to me as a wedding party gift. This was special because it was celebrating my dad’s voice on an important day. We’d celebrated my dad’s voice at my wedding, also that year, by drinking a bottle of wine he’d put aside for it 40 years earlier.

What inspired you to write this book?

I had wanted to write a book about the year my father died for over a decade. A lot of things happened that were life-changing, to the point of making me feel like I was living in a movie. 

The third item on my dad’s list said “write and have a few novels published.” My dad wrote a book of essays that he self-published in 1978, so if I wrote a book, too, these could be the “few novels.” The fact that I’d made my memoir a list item compelled me to persist with writing it. It was never just a vehicle to describe the list—it was on the list itself.

It’s difficult to explain why any work of art comes into being, and My Father’s List is no different. The best I can do is to say this story came to me and asked if I would tell it, and I said yes. 

What did you learn about yourself in doing the list?

I learned so much about myself doing the list, more than I can probably answer in one question. But what stands out is how important it is to trust yourself and think for yourself. My dad used to talk about the Information Age, and how my brother and I were living in it. In an age with a surplus of information, one has to be savvy about what one believes. We’re also living in a time where there’s a surplus of choice. Both of these situations can make people feel lost. 

A few years before starting on my father’s list, I made my own list of values. This primed me for doing my dad’s list, because my newfound respect for what I cared about, as an individual, made me value what he had cared about, too. But my dad’s list felt sacred. So even when I questioned how or whether I could accomplish certain items, I knew in my heart I had to try. I was now making heart-guided choices, which were sometimes illogical, but always true to that inner knowing—what my spirit wanted me to do. A lot of us are cut off from this part of ourselves or maybe don’t realize it exists. But my spirit was where I could still connect with my dad, so this helped lessen my grief and helped me move forward. In that realm, my father wasn’t gone. When I connected with my spirit, I also connected with his. 

There was something in that trying, and the knowing that my dad was helping, and my sense that this list was my calling—which meant God was helping, too—that forced me out of my comfort zone and outdated beliefs, and thrusted me into new ways of thinking. I learned that everything is figure-out-able and that if I make a mistake, it’s because I didn’t know enough—I can always learn and do better next time. I learned that as long as I followed my heart, I couldn’t get lost. And I learned that I didn’t need outside validation—my inner compass was enough. 

The world talks a lot these days about the search for hope. But I know now that hope lives inside of me.

What was your favorite list item to do?

I have so many favorites, but the most life-changing were “write and have a few novels published,” “visit Vienna” and “drive a Corvette,” while the most thrilling was “go sailing by myself.” Sometimes we think we can’t do things purely because we’ve been told that we can’t, directly or indirectly. It takes actually trying them to learn the truth. I’m a terrific sailor, I loved driving a Corvette (even 20 minutes from the intersection where my father died), I was a natural at solo travel in Europe, even when I barely spoke the language (and want to do it again), and I love writing books: Years ago, my dad and I had a talk in a diner about my newfound love of literature. I said Mary Shelley had reached a depth in Frankenstein that discussed the human condition, which was something I hoped to do as a writer too. It seemed to me the only point of it. My dad told me finding what I loved was the first step. The next was figuring out what to do with it. It took me 17 years to satisfy that challenge. Because of his list, I did.

I also loved the sweeter list items, like “help Laura win a scholarship” and “make my [spouse] feel healthy, happy, attractive and young every day of [their] life.” One encourages a life of learning, something I need to be happy. The other sets an intention for my spouse’s joy. It’s possible to invest in one’s self and one’s spouse at the same time. And probably a good idea.

What was the most challenging list item to do?

Definitely “own a large house and our own land,” “dance at my grandchildren’s weddings,” “make more money than I need,” “have five songs recorded,” and “beat a number-one seed in a tennis tournament.” I don’t want to give away the book, because these items define much of the conflict, but I can summarize: Each of these items, in their own way, helped me face lingering resentment I felt towards my father.

What other books inspired you as you wrote My Father’s List?

The first book I read when I started writing was Wild, by Cheryl Strayed. I had already seen the movie and cried because it felt like the first time I’d seen my life experience onscreen. What I loved about Wild, beyond its female protagonist, and the courage Strayed demonstrated in writing about her life, was that the female protagonist was flawed. Most of the time, the main characters in stories, if they’re female, exist as objects to be acquired—and of course that’s not how women’s inner monologues work. We are human, and thus the subjects of our own lives—we have agency. When I read Wild, I knew I needed to represent myself this way, and that I had to be completely transparent. My Father’s List is a story about inner growth and finding self-respect, and I couldn’t tell that story without showing the version of me who could not do that.

Ta-nehisi Coates’s book Between the World and Me helped me find my voice. He told the history of America as seen through a Black man’s eyes in his book, which was a letter to his son. My dad was an American Studies major, so America was one of his favorite topics. I knew that when I checked off list items that involved travel to American cities, I had to learn and tell the real history of those places and how this shaped the culture we live in today—particularly the voices of the marginalized.
Finally, pretty much anything Joseph Campbell has ever written guided the way I described my faith journey in this book. There are spiritual signs around every corner in My Father’s List, and there’s the sense of being on a path. Campbell believed that when you say yes to your own hero’s journey, doors open for you that might not have opened otherwise, and would not open for anyone else. That is what I experienced over and over again doing the list—and still am experiencing now.

There are a lot of travel items on the list. What was your favorite place to visit?

Vienna! The City of Music. It also turns out it’s the city of art. There’s a respect for history there that I haven’t found anywhere else. People are always saying things like, “leave the past behind you,” but the past made us who we are. If we can’t learn from cultural developments, how can we expand on them? People get better at innovating when they are open to what’s been done. I enjoy places where I can find the origins of things, and Vienna is rife for that. They also respect traditions—customs that only exist there. Also this place is breathtakingly beautiful. I rediscovered wonder in Vienna.

What was the most challenging part of writing this book?

Writing about my family. As I said above, I wrote about myself with complete transparency, flaws and all. But I could not do that with loved ones, who are all real people, living their own lives, and now reduced to characters in a book. The stories I tell that involve them in no way show the full wonder of who they are, and that was difficult because I didn’t want to diminish the breadth of those relationships. These are scenes from a life, not a whole life, and certainly not my whole world.

I also found revisiting traumatic memories challenging. But I’m so glad I did, that I forced myself to relive them, because it was by turning them into part of a larger story that I was finally able to heal.

Do you have your own bucket list?

Yes! It’s currently landing at 100 items and I’ve checked off 20, even while doing my dad’s! 

Are you working on a new project?

Yes! My next book. I’m in the research phase now, which means I’m following my intuition and trying to listen with an open heart for the next story that wants to come through.