BOOKS OF THE TIMES
Cleareyed, Full-Hearted, Unflinching Fatherhood
‘Father’s Day’ Is Buzz Bissinger’s Memoir About His Son
By DWIGHT GARNER
Published: May 14, 2012
Buzz Bissinger’s first book, “Friday Night Lights” (1990), about high school football in Odessa, Tex., was a best seller that’s become an acknowledged classic of American sports writing.
FATHER’S DAY
A Journey Into the Mind and Heart of My Extraordinary Son
By Buzz Bissinger
242 pages. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $26.
It became a pretty good moviestarring Billy Bob Thornton and Tim McGraw. It was made into a far better television series, easily among the most sublime ever produced. The football team’s motto in that show —“Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose” — percolates through the culture. I’ve heard grown men chant it only half-ironically in beer gardens, as a prelude to an evening of assiduous consumption.
This is a rare kind of success for a nonfiction writer, and you might think it would bring a measure of calm and satisfaction to the book’s author. If you suspect that’s the case, you don’t know much about Harry Gerard Bissinger III, who is universally known as Buzz.
His new memoir, “Father’s Day,” is ostensibly about his relationship with his son Zach, now in his 20s, whose brain was deprived of oxygen at birth and who has an I.Q. of about 70. (His twin brother, Gerry, was born without serious complications.)
Zach’s mental capabilities are restricted in many ways — he can barely understand the concept of money, for example — but limitless in others. He’s a savant, with a startling memory that sometimes resembles Dustin Hoffman character’s in “Rain Man.” Still, Mr. Bissinger declares about Zach in a typically blunt formulation: “Why sugarcoat it? My son is mentally retarded.”
“Father’s Day” takes the form of a road trip that father and son make across America. Its real journey, though, is interior. It’s a barely guided tour through Mr. Bissinger’s own roiling anxiety, his depression, his narcissism and his profound insecurity, not to mention what he sees as his failings as a man, as a father, as a son and as a writer.
He sometimes tamps down his freakouts, as well as what he calls his “mild bipolarity,” with “a morning cocktail of Klonopin, Effexor, Wellbutrin and Lamictal that my wife Lisa makes sure I have taken, terrified of medicated-less consequences.”
He’s such a pitcher of fits, tormentor of editors, haranguer on Twitter and overall basket case that he also declares about his third wife: “Lisa has told me several times that she is determined to die first to avoid the misery of taking care of me.” He’s like a garrulous Saul Bellow protagonist with Tourette’s syndrome.
“Father’s Day” is riveting and a bit frightening; Mr. Bissinger wears his emotions close to the surface. I’m not sure it’s a good book, but it’s a brutal and vivid one, the work of a writer with an unflinching gift for honesty, and impossible to put down. I read it in two short gulps, occasionally through the cracks in my fingers.
Among the places Mr. Bissinger and his son visit on their road trip is Odessa, where “Friday Night Lights” was set. Some there still haven’t forgiven Mr. Bissinger, for portraying open incidents of racism among other things. But that’s not what sends him into a tailspin.
Being there reminds him, he says, “that after almost 20 years, I still have not topped” that book. It feels like a curse. He worries he is played out as a writer. Worse, he fears he used some of Odessa’s young men’s lives for his own gain.
In a line that’s as slashing as anything in Janet Malcolm’s book “The Journalist and the Murderer,” he says: “All writers silently soak up despair for our own advantage; like dogs rolling in the guts of dead animals, the stink of others makes us giddy. We deny it but we lie in denying it.”
He has attempted to expiate his guilt. He tells us he’s given, over the years, some $70,000 to Boobie Miles, an Odessa football star whose career-ending injury is explored at length in “Friday Night Lights.” (He has written an e-book follow-up on Mr. Miles.)
His journalistic insecurity is so great, even after the success of “Friday Night Lights,” that he writes: “I had pathetically stopped reading The New York Times Book Review five years earlier because of my raging jealousy of other writers getting rave reviews. Without hyperbole, the nonfiction best-seller list sent me into hours of depression and bitterness so I could not look at it either.”
Mr. Bissinger approaches his son through a portrait of his own childhood. His father was a bond-firm president and his family was wealthy, with an apartment in Manhattan and a summer house on Nantucket. The author attended Andover and the University of Pennsylvania. But his mother lacked warmth, he says, and placed exorbitant pressure on him. “I vowed,” Mr. Bissinger writes, “that my children would never have to dance for me.”
Nothing prepared him, however, for Zach. His medical troubles ripped Mr. Bissinger’s first marriage apart. “I didn’t feel like crying,” he says. “I just felt like walking away.”
He feels he’s largely been in flight from the realities of his son’s life ever since.
The road trip is a chance to reconnect, but there’s an element of forced catharsis to the whole thing. Zach doesn’t like car travel or sightseeing very much. He’d rather be in an airplane. But the pair have some wonderful moments and an opportunity to bond as Kerouacian hombres on the road.
Some writers do their best thinking on the open interstate; Mr. Bissinger appears to be among them. He regularly writes things as good as this: “If you deliberately look for surprises and significance in life, all you find is an old box of cassettes by America and Heart and Peter Frampton you bought when you were alone and very drunk, and nobody else was watching.”
About Zach, Mr. Bissinger writes: “There is no rose-colored ending to any of this. There is no pretty little package with a tidy bow. He will never drive a car. He will never marry. He will never have children. I still fear for his future.”
Yet when Mr. Bissinger stopped looking for epiphanies with Zach, he says, “I found something far better.” I’d call it a measure of peace.
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