My Father’s Life, by Raymond Carver episode artwork

EPISODE · Jul 25, 2016 · 26 MIN

My Father’s Life, by Raymond Carver

from Esquire Classic Podcast · host PRX and Esquire Magazine

When he looks back at his father, he sees a dim figure losing its substance to sickness, and when the past is a cipher, there is no redeeming the present. There is only living it.

Episode metadata supplied by the publisher feed · Published Jul 25, 2016

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In Raymond Carver’s masterful short stories, what goes unspoken between characters—what can’t or won’t be articulated—carries more weight than what they say. In the 1984 essay “My Father’s Life,” Carver turns his unforgiving eye on his own life, and with heartbreaking frankness he examines the seemingly unbridgeable gap between him and his own father. The novelist Jay McInerney, who studied under Carver at Syracuse in the early eighties, joins host David Brancaccio to talk about his mentor’s approach to writing and teaching, and how there were things left unsaid between Carver and his father that would haunt both men all their lives.

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