My Father, the Pornographer, Chris Offutt
My Father, the Pornographer, Chris Offutt
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My Father, the Pornographer
A Memoir

Author: Chris Offutt

Narrator: Jonathan Yen

Unabridged: 7 hr 42 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 05/24/2016


Synopsis

When Andrew Offutt died, his son, Chris, inherited a desk, a rifle, and eighteen hundred pounds of pornographic fiction. Andrew had been considered the "king of twentieth-century smut," with a writing career that began as a strategy to pay for his son's orthodontic needs and soon took on a life of its own, peaking during the 1970s when the commercial popularity of the erotic novel reached its height.

With his dutiful wife serving as typist, Andrew wrote from their home in the Kentucky hills, locked away in an office no one dared intrude upon. Here he wrote more than four hundred pornographic novels. The more he wrote, the more intense his ambition became and the more difficult it was for his children to be part of his world.

Over the long summer of 2013, Chris returned to his hometown to help his widowed mother move out of his childhood home. As he began to examine his father's manuscripts, memorabilia, journals, and letters, he realized he finally had an opportunity to gain insight into the difficult, mercurial, sometimes cruel man he'd loved and feared in equal measure. Only in his father's absence could he truly make sense of the man and his legacy.

Contains mature themes.

About Chris Offutt

Chris Offutt is an award-winning author and screenwriter who worked on the HBO drama True Blood and the Showtime series Weeds. His books include Kentucky Straight, The Same River Twice, The Good Brother, Out of the Woods, and No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Short Stories, and many other anthologies. He lives near Oxford, Mississippi.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Meike on April 20, 2020

I loved Chris Offutt's Country Dark (which was criminally underappreciated in this year's award circuit) so much that I just had to read his memoir. Here, Offutt re-constructs the life of his father Andrew who supported his family writing science fiction and more than 400 pornographic novels and sto......more

Goodreads review by Lee on June 28, 2016

About 10 years ago the author was my teacher and now I know why he's so effed up (kidding!). One warm summer night on a back porch in Iowa City after dinner he told me a bit about his dad, who'd written something like 400 porn novels. I was totally engaged by the story (semi-incredulous too). After......more

Goodreads review by Kansas on March 13, 2022

"El éxito comercial de las novelas pornográficas estadounidenses tocó techo durante los años setenta, coincidiendo con el periodo más prolífico y más activo de mi padre. Solo en 1972 publicó dieciocho novelas. Papá escribió porno de piratas, porno de fantasmas, porno de ciencia ficción, porno de va......more

Goodreads review by Franco on March 28, 2016

El problema con las memorias es que son tan personales que es difícil que el lector sienta el valor y la importancia que les da su escritor. Las buenas memorias son aquellas que pueden, por alguna razón, provocar en alguien completamente ajeno un sentimiento de pertenencia. Offutt no llegó a generar......more

Goodreads review by Nood-Lesse on November 15, 2020

Mio padre.. Non date troppo peso al pornografo che compare nel titolo: è vero nella narrazione c’è un pornografo, ma avrebbe potuto essere un avvocato o un carpentiere, non avrebbe fatto differenza; ciò che conta davvero è il nome comune preceduto dall’aggettivo possessivo. Chris Offutt è uno scritto......more