My Father's Diet

Instantly relatable, impeccably realized, and grimly hilarious, My Father's Diet by Adrian Nathan West is an autopsy of our antiquated notions of manhood, and the perfect, bite-sized novel for a world always keen to mistake narcissism for introspection. Here's an excerpt:

My father—my real father, whom I rarely saw throughout my childhood, because my mother divorced him when I was two, and he’d moved to the Midwest to make something of himself—was tall, with a splayed, reclining stance that brought prominence to his round belly. His large, gold-framed glasses gave his eyes a tint of amber. They rested halfway down an unusually shaped nose like a seahorse’s snout, with an initial, broad bow rising up between the caruncles, then turning in briefly on itself before flourishing in a so!, almost square bump. His glasses seemed always to be falling o”, to have gotten smudged; or one stem would be tucked cleanly behind his ear while the other had wandered up the side of his head; or else the plastic pads on the bridge piece would have bent, so that they sat at an angle on his face, giving him the aspect of a drunkard or the loser in a fight. They caused him a lot of trouble, and were as oftenin his hands as on his face. His long, flat fingers would polish the lens with a fold of shirttail, or slide a milky-colored nail into the screw; if it pulled away from the cuticle, my father would bellow and put it in his mouth, and the glasses would have to be sent o” to the shop.

While away, he finished an advanced degree, the acquisition of which was a source of such pride that on his address labels and credit cards and even the message that greeted callers when he was away from his phone, the honorific doctor always preceded his name. Once or twice, to excuse his long absence, he complained of the poverty of opportunities available in the 1980s in the city of my birth. He had wanted more for himself, he claimed, among other things because he hoped to o”er me more of what he called chances that he’d never had himself. But my mother always avowed that his disappearance had nothing to do with ambition. When I was a baby, the two of them had gone to a party, she told me several times, at the home of a musician friend of my father’s, and she had opened a bathroom door to find my father with his pants around his knees and a woman acquaintance in a similar state of undress. My mother turned and ran o” screaming, and my father chased her, holding up his trousers and swearing that it wasn’t what it looked like. My mother would laugh at this stage of the story, which was one of her favorites, squeezing her eyelids into jaded slivers and blowing twin tapers of cigarette smoke from her nose.

I have only two memories of him from before he left. Once, getting me ready for daycare, he tried to strip me of my favorite red corduroys, which I had been wearing all week, and to force me into another pair that I hated, of a dull moss green that even in the early 1980s had already fallen out of fashion. “Goddamn it, you’ll mind me,” he said as he held me down. Another time, attracted by its bright, mysterious tip, smoldering under a crust of white ash, I took one of his cigars from the glass ashtray, touched it to my belly button, and began to howl and heave as my skin cooked and welted. My mother yelled at my father for leaving me alone with it, and he protested that he’d been gone only a second.

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