Chapter Four - ‘I Really Was the Son of Such a Man’: Replacing the Father in Richard Freadman's Shadow of Doubt: My Father and Myself

Summary

If I didn't have the story appointed for me by my father, did that mean I didn't have a story? Not a Story: I realise now that Dad was calling the shots more than twenty years after his death. Fathers choose our stories for us […] and if we refuse the choice we go without.

—Paul John Eakin, Living Autobiographically

My greatest debt is to my father - for what he said, wrote and did while he was alive, and for what he left behind. I dedicate the book to his memory.

—Richard Freadman, Shadow of Doubt

The Child is Father of the Man;

And I could wish my days to be

Bound each to each by natural piety.

—William Wordsworth, ‘My Heart Leaps Up’

Roger Porter's recent Bureau of Missing Persons: Writing the Secret Lives of Fathers describes how a number of contemporary autobiographies and memoirs focus on fathers who engaged in lying or fabrication, intentionally concealing their identity from their families by various means. In the sub-genre he terms ‘The Child's Book of Parental Deception’ (Bureau 2), Porter shows how the autobiographical act is not only about unveiling the secrets and lies of the father, but a narrative of the son's or daughter's search, as the author becomes a kind of detective in a crime story: ‘Amassing clues, data, and facts, these writers, sleuths of selfhood, gather and sift evidence in the documents, attempting to establish a degree of certitude’ about the father's identity and hence, their own (10).