My Father's Footprints

June 9, 2003
Examining male identity with mortality as a thematic backdrop, Hartford Courant
columnist McEnroe (Swimming Chickens) offers a prismatic family portrait. Memories of his Connecticut childhood and fond flashbacks of his father, Bob, who faces death with "merriment and sadness," blur, refract and fade into present-day images of his adopted son, Joey. This sensitive and moving book-length expansion of an essay McEnroe wrote for Men's Health
in 1999 will remind many of the life-affirming lessons taught in sportswriter Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie. McEnroe, a baby boomer, documents the dying days of his father, the playwright Robert E. McEnroe (1916–1998). At age seven, Colin found his calling as a humorist when he saw Eddie Foy Jr. on Broadway in his father's short-lived musical Donnybrook!
(1961): "I just want to be that man, get those laughs." Yet he also saw Broadway's bright lights dim for his father, who wrote a stack of unpublished novels and unproduced plays (excerpted here) until he changed from acclaimed playwright into "an eccentric real estate agent" before his final curtain fell. McEnroe recalls all this with poignant phrasing, wit, wisdom and style. (July 16)Forecasts:A national print publicity campaign, Web marketing and ads in the
New Yorker, the
New York Times and
Ruminator should draw in readers who adored
Tuesdays with Morrie.

July 1, 2003
Here's an interesting way to write a memoir: backwards. The author begins with the passing of his father, playwright Robert McEnroe, and moves back through the years. We see a relationship developing in reverse, beginning with the son, a grown man, taking care of his father. Gradually, father and son assume their traditional roles: the author is a boy, and his father is the protector. Because of its structure, this memoir is far more touching and emotional than many similar remembrances of lost loved ones. The author shows us his father as he was before his death, with failing body and mind, and then leads us back through the years to let us see the strong, intelligent man he used to be. We see everything the father once was, and this allows us to understand, and even (to some degree) feel the son's loss.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2003, American Library Association.)