A Lie about My Father

"The lie in the title of this memoir is born of shame. Traveling around upstate New York in the 1990s, John Burnside can't bear to share the truth about his father during a casual conversation with a hitchhiker. He covers his uneasiness with a lie. It felt natural to do so." "His father, abandoned as a baby on a stranger's doorstep, created a masterful web of deceit to erase this unbearable fact. John, even as a child, represented everything that was wrong with the world and became the recipient of his father's self-hatred in the form of enraged violence, and worse, petty, cruel belittlement. Growing up in the tough working-class neighborhoods of Scotland and England, John learned to lie back to his father, and later, about his father."--BOOK JACKET.