Jennifer Senior writes: You have to wonder whether Andy Offutt’s furious, sadistic imagination also explains his sadism toward his children. Porn may not have been outlet enough. (He frequently told his son that were it not for pornography, he’d have been a serial killer.) More important, though, I think you have to wonder how it affected the adolescent sexuality of his children: What happens when your father is a furnace not just of smoldering rage, but of ferocious, shocking fantasies?
Mr. Offutt doesn’t seem to go in for “dime-story psychology,” as he calls it at one point. But we do get a clue. It’s the most tragic part of his memoir, and it arrives by stealth. At roughly the same moment he describes exploring the mysterious contents of his father’s office, he recalls his visits to the “fatman,” an overweight sad sack in town who sexually abused Chris when he was 15.
“Later, I decided that my parents would be proud of my open-mindedness in such a small town,” he writes. “I believed that what I was doing with the fatman made me similar to them. They wrote porn and had affairs. If they knew about the fatman, they would respect me, maybe even like me.”
It really hurts to read this.
Through it all, Mr. Offutt somehow manages to summon compassion for his father. That, ultimately, is what makes this memoir so unexpectedly moving. He admires his dad’s bravery for choosing a writing life. He wishes his dad didn’t have to become a hack, seeing real potential in his fecund, rambunctious imagination. And most of all, he pities his father’s loneliness, for being sentenced to a lifetime preoccupation with torture and a headful of savage sexual fantasies, predicated on the harming of innocents.
