My Three Dads
Patriarchy on the Great Plains
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Sharp and thought-provoking, this memoir-meets-cultural criticism upends the romanticism of the Great Plains and the patriarchy at the core of its ideals.
For many Americans, Kansas represents a vision of Midwestern life that is good and wholesome and evokes the American ideals of god, home, and country. But for those like Jessa Crispin who have grown up in Kansas, the realities are much harsher. She argues that the Midwestern values we cling to cover up a long history of oppression and control over Native Americans, women, and the economically disadvantaged.
Blending personal narrative with social commentary, Crispin meditates on why the American Midwest still enjoys an esteemed position in our country’s mythic self-image. Ranging from The Wizard of Oz to race, from chastity to rape, from radical militias and recent terrorist plots to Utopian communities, My Three Dads opens on a comic scene in a Kansas rent house the author shares with a (masculine) ghost. This prompts Crispin to think about her intellectual fathers, her spiritual fathers, and her literal fathers. She is curious to understand what she has learned from them and what she needs to unlearn about how a person should be in a family, as a citizen, and as a child of god—ideals, Crispin argues, that have been established and reproduced in service to hierarchy, oppression, and wealth.
Written in Crispin’s well-honed voice—smart, assured, comfortable with darkness—My Three Dads offers a kind of bleak redemption, the insight that no matter where you go, no matter how far from home you roam, the place you came from is always with you, “like it or not.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Crispin (The Dead Ladies Club), founder of Bookslut, takes the ideals of the American Midwest to task in this scorching blend of memoir and social critique. In an attempt to exorcise the oppressive beliefs she internalized growing up in small-town Kansas, Crispin unpacks her hometown's values of religion, family, and "this very Midwestern version of masculinity that is all emotional constipation," while contending with the "atrocities" they've engendered throughout history. In a section titled "The Father," Crispin recalls a murder-suicide committed by her art teacher on his family in the 1990s to underscore the prevalence of male violence in rural communities and muse on the cultural obsession with "tell stories about dead white women." Another astute appraisal uses the martyrdom of John Brown—the abolitionist who combined religious fervor and guns—to examine the complications of culpability when violence is carried out in the name of a perceived greater good. Crispin also dives into her own evangelical youth in the 1980s to poke holes in the promise of the nuclear family structure while considering the pitfalls of subscribing to religion as a means to escape "the terror of freedom. The terror of ourselves." It doesn't strike a particularly hopeful note, but Crispin's erudite analysis and biting wit make this multifaceted history unmissable. Searing and intelligent, this delivers on all counts.