My Father's Guru
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
As a child growing up in the Hollywood Hills during the 1950s, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson thought it was perfectly normal that a guru named Paul Brunton lived with his family and dictated everything about their daily rituals, from their diet to their travel plans to his parents’ sex life. But in this extraordinary memoir, Masson reflects on just how bizarre everything about his childhood was–especially the relationship between his father and the elusive, eminent mystic he revered (and supported) for years.
Writing with candor and charm, Masson describes how his father became convinced that Paul Brunton–P.B. to his familiars–was a living God who would fill his life with enlightenment and wonder. As the Masson family’s personal guru, Brunton freely discussed his life on other planets, laid down strict rules on fasting and meditation, and warned them all of the imminence of World War III. For years, young Jeffrey was as ardent a disciple as his father–but with the onset of adolescence, he staged a dramatic revolt against this domestic deity and everything he stood for.
Filled with absurdist humor and intimate confessions, My Father’s Guru is the spellbinding coming-of-age story of one of our most brilliant writers.
REVIEWS
“An uncompromising yet compassionate book . . . A coming-of-age memoir unlike any other.”
–The Toronto Star
“AN EXTRAORDINARY CAUTIONARY TALE …. about the enduring human impulse to imbue charismatic individuals with superhuman attributes.”
–San Francisco Chronicle
“Told with a mixture of humor and compassion. . . . Throughout this confessional book a grown man tells of an unusual, even weird childhood and the blind submission that consumed his family’s life.”
–ROBERT COLES
The New York Times Book Review
“My Father’s Guru is an interesting account of a warped upbringing made fascinating by the insight it provides into Masson’s adult life. He makes no excuses: in initially revering Freud and other authority figures, Masson realizes he was seeking new and better gurus that Brunton–and was fated to reject them pitilessly when they showed themselves, like Brunton, to be merely human.”
–Los Angeles Times Book Review
“Beneath the guru-bashing, the book is Masson’s poignant and loving indictment of his parents, worth reading for his psychological portrait of coming-of-age disillusionment.”
–Seattle Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Final Analysis: The Making and Unmaking of a Psychologist , Masson told of his pursuit and abandonment of his career as a psychoanalyst, the time of his life during which he also wrote The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory. Here he combines autobiography with the examination of another exalted, and then diminished, figure in his life. In 1945, when the author was four years old, his father, Jacques, whose family was originally from Bukhara in Central Asia, spent four months in India with Paul Brunton (1898-1981), an English writer largely credited with introducing Indian mysticism to the West. In the years following, Brunton--known as P.B.--often lived with the Masson family, which included the author's mother Diana and his sister Linda. Strongly influenced by the ascetic, mysterious Brunton (``He rarely openly stated anything, he preferred to hint''), the young Masson was treated as ``a little guru in the making.'' But years of travel and study (at Harvard College and Oxford University, where he became a Sanskrit scholar) made Masson less willing a believer. He and Brunton broke their relationship when the author was in his mid-20s, though P.B. and Masson's father remained close. This gracefully told tale, laced with deep disappointment and acknowledged revenge, is of greater interest for its glimpse of an unusual family than for its sad unmasking of a hero.
