Summer of Deliverance
A Memoir of Father and Son
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Summer of Deliverance is a powerful and moving memoir of anger, love, and reconciliation between a son and his father. Hailed as a literary genius of his generation, James Dickey created his art and lived his life with a ferocious passion. He was a heavy drinker, a destructive husband and father, a poet of grace and sensitivity, and, after the publication and subsequent film of his novel, Deliverance, a wildly popular literary star. Drawing on letters, notebooks, diaries, and his explicit conversations with his father, Christopher Dickey has crafted a superb memoir of the corrosive effects of fame, a moving remembrance of a crisis that united a family, and an inspiring celebration of love between father and son.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
When his father, James Dickey, the poet and novelist, became ill in 1996, the author went to take care of him, not out of any great love, but rather from a sense of duty. On the very first page of this beautifully written dual-biography of father and son, Dickey, Newsweek's Paris bureau chief and author of Innocent Blood, refers to his father as the man who "killed my mother." Fame and alcohol were the twin demons of the Dickey household and Christopher traces their devastating effects during his father's slow evolution from a struggling writer to a celebrity poet and author of the novel Deliverance. His poetry led Dickey around the country to universities where he played the poet and seduced the students--all in the face of his increasingly alcoholic wife. But Christopher feels that the year when Deliverance was made into a movie, in the early '70s, marked the real turning point when many things were "exploited," including his father's integrity. What followed was a disaster of celebrity, as Dickey began "talking his poems, his books, his big projects into existence, when there was little or nothing on the page." Shortly after, Jim Dickey's wife died and he married a much younger--though equally alcoholic--woman. Dickey fils doesn't spare himself as when he recounts trying to sleep with his father's mistress and the destruction of his first marriage. But there is resurrection at the end: a solid second marriage, his rescue of his father and his young half-sister from their hellish life, and the reconciliation a few months before his father's death in January 1997. "Poetry is a matter of luck," Dickey recalls his father saying. "You can't teach it. You can point it out when it occurs." This unflinching and deeply affecting memoir is one of those places where real poetry occurs. Editor, Alice Mayhew; agent, Kathy Robbins.
