Late Nights with Cats

It doesn’t happen often, but every once in a while, I experience a sleepless night. Sometimes due to stress. Sometimes due to the unfortunate fluctuation of my cycle. It’s never pleasant. It screws up my next day. It screws up any plans I may have had. It usually throws a wrench in whatever my lovely spouse wanted to accomplish too, as she wastes hours trying to help me sleep when I can’t.

Eventually I give up and go to the sitting room and try to at least do some of the work I was planning for the next day, so I don’t feel so lost. And always, when I leave the bedroom, I get a procession of cats coming with me. They’re a bit bleary-eyed and confused that it’s so early and I’m not in bed, but I appreciate their company at least.

A Reckoning

I was drawn to JR Ackerley’s My Father and Myself because, as I’ve gotten older, I have developed an appreciation for literature that examines the complicated ties between parents and children and what kind of suffering happens when these are strained, broken, or malignant from the start. The moment real adulthood begins is when you look at the grown-ups around you and realize that they are people and they may not always know what’s best for you or understand your experience. Or, in some cases, even know you very well at all.

Ackerley is going through these struggles with his father, a man he always felt distant from partially because Ackerley was gay and always felt that his sexuality served as a chasm that would never allow them to understand each other, but also because of his father’s propensity for dirty jokes and making people uncomfortable with his overbearing personality. However, after his father’s death, Ackerley finds out that his father had a secret life and a past that no one could have anticipated.

As a warning, below this point in the review, there will be spoilers.

A Look at the Self

Though this book is about Ackerley’s father and his relationship with him both before and after his death, it is more about Ackerley himself as he figures out both his sexuality and how to navigate life as a gay man in an era where it was illegal. Dealing with the evils that his father has wrought and the truths he was trying to hide (a relationship with another man that he’d had in his youth and abandoned suddenly, as well as another wife and children that he was supporting), Ackerley struggles to make sense of the image he’d had of the man he had known. While he was never close with his father, it is another thing altogether to reconcile a deception of this magnitude, let alone deal with the aftermath of his death in relation to it.

It is through this fallout that Ackerley starts to figure out who he is, and he attempts to trace how his father’s actions changed the trajectory of his life and his attitude towards people and himself.

Closure or Lack Thereof

Ackerley struggles and eventually finds a kind of closure that works for him, but I wouldn’t call it exactly satisfying for the reader. I suppose I wanted to see some anger at Ackerley’s father’s disgusting entitlement and the fact that he used multiple people’s lives as just toys for his amusement. Ackerley doesn’t have that kind of anger in him. Worse, he keeps the facts of what his father had done away from his still-living mother. Infantilising her to an extent that is really difficult to read.

And, in that moment, you cannot help but draw a line between father and son and it is very hard to unsee.

Long Nights with Cats

Though I am glad to have their company, the cats don’t make the night less long. Also, if I happen to stay awake long enough that dawn nears, they start to wonder if they could possibly have a little bit of breakfast early? Please? The answer is a resounding no. I know cats and I know that if I give in and provide them with just one 5am meal, then I will be doomed to at least a week of early morning begging when I really need to be catching up on sleep.