Origins of the Universe and What It All Means

June 15, 2016
Life with father isn't always the stuff of greeting cards.As Firstman's (Writing/Coll. of the Sequoias and California State Univ., Fresno) memoir opens, we find her scientist father dying, but not so quickly that he doesn't have time to request a shipment of references books, DVDs, posters, and so forth. Having established that her father is a man of parts and letters, the author slowly reveals a more nuanced, less sympathetic, and certainly more compromised figure than the eccentric, bookish fellow we first encounter. He effectively abandoned her in childhood, she writes, but not out of intentional cruelty; chalk it up to Asperger's, perhaps, or to the fact that "he just wasn't all that interested in fatherhood." But he was interested in whether she had any desire to appear nude in Playboy. "I think I understood that if I answered 'yes, ' " she writes, " 'I would be making promises I wasn't ready to make and I wasn't sure I wanted to keep.' " That she was 6 or 7 at the time of the question makes it all the creepier, but having unveiled the very fact that he asked it, the author tucks it away again, saying only that it taught her to "withhold the answer an adult, any adult, expected of me." A touch more anger, if not at the white-hot level of, say, Carobeth Laird's Encounter with an Angry God, would not be out of place, but Firstman writes with cool evenhandedness of her father's many accomplishments and shortcomings, some of which can indeed be attributed to the spectrum, some to a dynamic of codependence: "I recognize the literary injustice here," she writes of her mother, "how the absent parent--my father--gets the most page time." In the end, the book, with its ironic title, will leave most readers glad that their families are normal, at least by comparison. A saddening but ultimately redeeming memoir that, though well-paced and well-told, is of limited appeal.

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August 1, 2016
Firstman's reflections on life with her scientist father, who was equally smart, strange, engaging, and emotionally obtuse, is as much about his work as a biologist as it is about the difficult path she navigated as his daughter. Between wry observations made while packing up various objects in his California house to mail to his current digs in Mexico (a complete set of Great Books of the Western World, his correspondence with evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, back issues of Scientific American), she reflects upon scorpion-collecting trips at his side in the desert and far too many inappropriate conversations where his inability to censor himself was on full display. Married six times, twice to her mother, (who, she guiltily admits, deserves more attention than he does), he sparked her intense curiosity, which she brings to her inquiry into what it has meant to have him in her life. This unique debut easily stands out among memoirs because it is as much about considering the world around us as it is about one very interesting father-daughter relationship.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)