My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir by Chris Offutt (Epub)

Description

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. In this fashion he wrote more than four hundred novels, including pirate porn, ghost porn, zombie porn, and secret agent porn. 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 and 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.

In My Father, the Pornographer, Offutt takes us on the journey with him, reading his father’s prodigious literary output as both a critic and as a son seeking answers. This is a book about the life of a working writer who supports his family solely by the output of his typewriter; it’s about the awful psychic burdens one generation unthinkingly passes along to the next; and it’s about growing up in the Appalachian hills with a pack of fearless boys riding bicycles through the woods, happy and free.

User’s Reviews

Unknown “A generous reminiscence . . . ruminative and melancholy . . . Offutt somehow manages to summon compassion for his father. That, ultimately, is what makes this memoir so unexpectedly moving.” (The New York Times)“A literary detective story interwoven with memories of a youth riddled with sexual confusion and inarticulate yearning. . . . There is a touching universality to his tale and its mix of longing and despair . . . . In the end, the value of this haunting account lies in Offutt’s refusal to find a pat moral in his journey.” (The Washington Post)”One of the most sensitive, nuanced examinations of father and son relationships I’ve read.” (Boston Globe)”A heartbreaking coming-of-age story . . . Many scenes rival the stories of Jeannette Walls or Mary Karr . . . . Awe-inspiring, tender, gut-wrenching, forgiving.” (Atlanta Journal Constitution)“Required reading.” (New York Post)“Fascinating . . . funny, engaging.” (St. Louis Post Dispatch)“[A]thoughtful, elegant memoir . . . While the beating heart of the book is itsdepiction of a complicated father-son relationship, it also [. . .] preserves a slice of forgottenliterary life within its keenly felt, lyrical portrayal of a son wrestling withhis father’s inheritance.” (Bookpage)“My Father, the Pornographer is contemporary memoir at its best. Itachieves the rare miracle of re-creating the human heart on the page.” (The Rumpus)“The least titillating book you’ll ever read about porn, and possibly the most interesting, Offutt’s memoir. . . [is] a loving if unsparing tribute to a very complicated father.” (New York Magazine)”This is a frank, clear-eyed, but subtle memoir that works through raw emotion to arrive at an empathetic understanding of what fractures and binds families.” (Publishers Weekly, Starred Review)”A heartbreaking tale about identity, overcoming fear, and forgiving someone more committed to his craft than his family.” (Booklist)“Everything Chris Offutt writes is beautiful and brilliant, but My Father, the Pornographer is an astonishing house of mysteries, and his most moving book yet. It’s about family and secrets and a literal ton of pornography, but also, fascinatingly, what it means to make a writing life, whether high art or pulp.” (Elizabeth McCracken )“Chris Offutt owns one of the finest, surest prose styles around, ready and able to convey the hardest truth without flinching. Now Offutt enters the darkest and most mysterious of places—the cave of a monstrous enigma named Andrew J. Offutt—armed with nothing but his own restless curiosity. Spoiler alert: He makes it out alive, walking into the daylight to bring us a deeper, funnier, more tender and more heartbroken truth—and his masterpiece.” (Michael Chabon )“Chris Offutt has written the finest book of his distinguished career, a memoir that delivers an understanding of the complicated negotiations we must make between our obsessions and those mysterious others whom we call family. Direct, forceful, and completely unsentimental, this book goes on the short shelf of our best literature about fathers and sons.” (Ann Packer, author of The Children’s Crusade ) “My Father the Pornographer is a brave, engaging, dangerous piece of work. An uncompromising examination of a writer’s life, it raises questions both complex and haunting. Offutt is truly naked on the page, revealing his father’s secret obsessions, and his own. I am lost in admiration for what he has done.” (Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina ) “With My Father, the Pornographer, Chris imparts many rich and hard-won lessons to his lucky readers. This is a memoir that’s not only insightful but also funny, harrowing, and searingly honest.” (Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times Bestselling Author ) “The death of Chris Offutt’s father left him with what amounted to a secret estate that redefined his family—and Chris himself. Only a writer of Offutt’s caliber could transform that experience into this heartbreaking triumph. This is a must-read, an unforgettable and entirely original story.” (Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night ) “With gripping precision, Chris Offutt tracks the hidden life of his brilliant, cruel and narcissistic father. My Father, the Pornographer is a son’s reckoning not only with a parent’s dark, often shocking secrets but with their human cost. This is an utterly absorbing and heartbreaking book.” (Honor Moore, author of The Bishop’s Daughter ) “Though his relationship with his father was distant, melancholic, and precarious, Offutt quite movingly weaves his personal history into a fascinating tapestry of a compulsive writer with a knack for the naughty.” (Kirkus Reviews)Praise for Chris Offutt:”Offutt’s obvious kin are Richard Ford, Tobias Wolff, and Ernest Hemingway.” (The New York Times Book Review)”Offutt’s rambles through the lowlands have shown him the ugly in life, and in himself, and in that confrontation he has realized his art.” (The Washington Post Book World)”Offutt never uses a metaphor that isn’t perfect, nor one that doesn’t reveal character…Prose doesn’t get any sharper than Chris Offutt’s.” (Baltimore Sun)”Offutt is a lasting literary talent on a national scale…If you haven’t read Chris Offutt, you’ve missed an accomplished and compelling writer.” (Chicago Tribune)”Offutt packs more emotion, and more emotional truth, into a sentence than any American writer since Raymond Carver.” (Newsday)”Offutt is a wild original.” (St. Petersburg Times)”Offutt’s genius is how thoroughly he can scare you into seeing yourself.” (The San Diego Union-Tribune) Review “A generous reminiscence . . . ruminative and melancholy . . . Offutt somehow manages to summon compassion for his father. That, ultimately, is what makes this memoir so unexpectedly moving.” (The New York Times)“A literary detective story interwoven with memories of a youth riddled with sexual confusion and inarticulate yearning. . . . There is a touching universality to his tale and its mix of longing and despair . . . . In the end, the value of this haunting account lies in Offutt’s refusal to find a pat moral in his journey.” (The Washington Post)“The least titillating book you’ll ever read about porn, and possibly the most interesting, Offutt’s memoir. . . [is] a loving if unsparing tribute to a very complicated father.” (New York Magazine)”One of the most sensitive, nuanced examinations of father and son relationships I’ve read.” (Boston Globe)”A heartbreaking coming-of-age story . . . Many scenes rival the stories of Jeannette Walls or Mary Karr . . . . Awe-inspiring, tender, gut-wrenching, forgiving.” (Atlanta Journal Constitution)”Most men come to a point in their lives where they must make some kind of reckoning with their fathers — it is practically the oldest story there is. Offutt’s experience was more fraught than most, but nonetheless there is a touching universality to his tale and its mix of longing and despair. In the end, the value of this haunting account lies in Chris Offutt’s refusal to find a pat moral in his journey, or to reach for some neat, bow-wrapped reconciliation.” (The Washington Post)“Required reading.” (New York Post)“Fascinating . . . funny, engaging.” (St. Louis Post Dispatch)“[A]thoughtful, elegant memoir . . . While the beating heart of the book is its depiction of a complicated father-son relationship, it also [. . .] preserves a slice of forgotten literary life within its keenly felt, lyrical portrayal of a son wrestling with his father’s inheritance.” (Bookpage)“My Father, the Pornographer is contemporary memoir at its best. Itachieves the rare miracle of re-creating the human heart on the page.” (The Rumpus)”This is a frank, clear-eyed, but subtle memoir that works through raw emotion to arrive at an empathetic understanding of what fractures and binds families.” (Publishers Weekly, Starred Review)”A heartbreaking tale about identity, overcoming fear, and forgiving someone more committed to his craft than his family.” (Booklist)“Everything Chris Offutt writes is beautiful and brilliant, but My Father, the Pornographer is an astonishing house of mysteries, and his most moving book yet. It’s about family and secrets and a literal ton of pornography, but also, fascinatingly, what it means to make a writing life, whether high art or pulp.” (Elizabeth McCracken )“Chris Offutt owns one of the finest, surest prose styles around, ready and able to convey the hardest truth without flinching. Now Offutt enters the darkest and most mysterious of places—the cave of a monstrous enigma named Andrew J. Offutt—armed with nothing but his own restless curiosity. Spoiler alert: He makes it out alive, walking into the daylight to bring us a deeper, funnier, more tender and more heartbroken truth—and his masterpiece.” (Michael Chabon )“Chris Offutt has written the finest book of his distinguished career, a memoir that delivers an understanding of the complicated negotiations we must make between our obsessions and those mysterious others whom we call family. Direct, forceful, and completely unsentimental, this book goes on the short shelf of our best literature about fathers and sons.” (Ann Packer, author of The Children’s Crusade )My Father the Pornographer is a brave, engaging, dangerous piece of work. An uncompromising examination of a writer’s life, it raises questions both complex and haunting. Offutt is truly naked on the page, revealing his father’s secret obsessions, and his own. I am lost in admiration for what he has done.” (Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina )”With My Father, the Pornographer, Chris imparts many rich and hard-won lessons to his lucky readers. This is a memoir that’s not only insightful but also funny, harrowing, and searingly honest.” (Curtis Sittenfeld, New York Times Bestselling Author )“The death of Chris Offutt’s father left him with what amounted to a secret estate that redefined his family—and Chris himself. Only a writer of Offutt’s caliber could transform that experience into this heartbreaking triumph. This is a must-read, an unforgettable and entirely original story.” (Alexander Chee, author of The Queen of the Night )”With gripping precision, Chris Offutt tracks the hidden life of his brilliant, cruel and narcissistic father. My Father, the Pornographer is a son’s reckoning not only with a parent’s dark, often shocking secrets but with their human cost. This is an utterly absorbing and heartbreaking book.” (Honor Moore, author of The Bishop’s Daughter )“Though his relationship with his father was distant, melancholic, and precarious, Offutt quite movingly weaves his personal history into a fascinating tapestry of a compulsive writer with a knack for the naughty.” (Kirkus Reviews) Amazon.com Review An Amazon Best Book of February 2016: There’s something wildly readable about My Father, the Pornographer. Chris Offutt grew up in rural Kentucky in the 1970s with three siblings, his mother, and his father. The father, Andrew Offutt, was a domestic despot who ruled the house by fear and edict—when he wasn’t intimidating his family, he spent most of his time writing science fiction and fantasy novels, as well as lots of pornography, which at the time was a reasonable way for a writer to make ends meet. The jumping off point of the book, and the catalyst for many of the younger Offutt’s memories, takes place upon Andrew Offutt’s death, when Chris begins to catalog his father’s life’s work. “My father was a brilliant man, a true iconoclast, fiercely self-reliant, a dark genius, cruel, selfish, and eternally optimistic,” Chris Offutt writes. We see the father through Chris’ eyes, and we see Chris and the rest of the family through his father’s eyes. This is a fascinating memoir: honest, dark, amusing, and overlaid with a son’s deep, if strained, love for his father. — Chris Schluep –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. My Father, the Pornographer Chapter One MY FATHER grew up in a log cabin near Taylorsville, Kentucky. The house had twelve-inch walls with gun ports to defend against attackers, first Indians, then soldiers during the Civil War. At age twelve, Dad wrote a novel of the Old West. He taught himself to type with the Columbus method—find it and land on it—using one finger on his left hand and two fingers on his right. Dad typed swiftly and with great passion. He eventually wrote and published more than four hundred books under eighteen different names. His novels included six science fiction, twenty-four fantasy, and one thriller. The rest was pornography. When I was nine, Dad gave me his childhood copy of Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. The old hardback was tattered, the boards held by fraying strips of fabric, the pages pliant and soft. It is a coming-of-age narrative about thirteen-year-old Jim Hawkins, who discovers a secret map, leaves England, and returns with a large share of pirate treasure. I loved the fast-paced story and the bravery of young Jim. On paper cut from a brown grocery sack, I carefully drew an island with a coastline, water, and palm trees. A dotted line led to a large red X. My mother suggested I show the map to my father. Dad wiped coffee on the paper and wadded it up several times, which made it seem older. He used matches to ignite the edges of the map, then quickly extinguished the flame. This produced a charred and ragged border that enhanced the map’s appearance, as if it had barely survived destruction. Because of the fire involved, we were alone outside, away from my younger siblings. Dad was selling insurance at the time, rarely home, his attention always focused elsewhere. I enjoyed the sense of closeness, a shared project. Dad said that he drew maps for most of the books he wrote, and I resolved that if I ever published a book, I’d include a map. Twenty years later I did. In 1990 I called my father with the news that Vintage Contemporaries was publishing Kentucky Straight, my first book. A long silence ensued as Dad digested the information. “I’m sorry,” he said. “What do you mean?” I said. “I didn’t know I’d given you a childhood terrible enough to make you a writer.” His own father wrote short stories in the 1920s. During the Depression, my grandfather was forced to abandon his literary ambitions to save the family farm and pursue a more practical education in engineering. He died young, a year before my father published his first story. Dad never knew what it was like to have a proud father and didn’t know how to be one himself. After the publication of Kentucky Straight, people began asking Dad what he thought of my success. Buried in the question was the implication that the son had outdone the father. My work was regarded as serious literature, whereas he wrote porn and science fiction. Twice I witnessed someone insinuate that Dad should be envious. Invariably my father had the same response. His favorite adventure novel was The Three Musketeers, in which young D’Artagnan wins respect through his magnificent swordplay, taught to him by his father. Every time someone asked Dad about my success as a writer, he said he was happy to be D’Artagnan’s sword master, voicing pride in my accomplishments but taking credit for them, as well. It was as close as he ever came to telling me how he felt about my work. –This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Reviews from Amazon users, collected at the time the book is getting published on UniedVRG. It can be related to shiping or paper quality instead of the book content:

⭐ In the fall of 1976, I attended a lecture at Ohio State University. It was my first year as a student and, as part of our orientation, we were supposed to visit different events on the campus. I choose this lecture because it was sponsored by the Terrain League, a club for science fiction enthusiasts. I’d never heard of Andrew Offutt the science fiction writer before, but it was a way to get out of the dorms for the evening. And it was free.As I sat down, an older woman sat next to me. I didn’t think she was a student, but paid her no mind as there were all kinds of people at this event, most my age, but many senior ones as well. One lady I remember in particular talked about the Society for Creative Anachronisms, a medieval recreationist organization. She was there because Offutt wrote sword and sorcery fiction for Zebra Books. I don’t remember the name of the lecture, but it had to do with the impact of science on the present day.To put it mildly, the speaker was on fire. I didn’t know it at the time, but Offutt was the current president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, the first time he’d held that office. Combined with an invitation to speak in front of a group of students at a prestigious Midwestern university, he must have felt his time had come to be known as a serious genre writer. I recall him reading a passage from a book. When he reached a section talking about behaviorist B F Skinner, he flipped the audience off. Quickly he brought his hand down and explained, “I’ve been conditioned to do that”.He rambled on for a good hour and took questions at the end. I had the impression he’d hated his former career as an insurance salesman as he talked with distaste about his weekly trip to the barber and the suit it forced him it wear. He talked about the way his own father would beat him and he’d vowed to get back. He complained about editors who didn’t understand scientific notation. He talked about how publishers expected you to sign over the rights to the solar system if you wanted to see your book in print (“You have to tell them, I want to keep the moon, Venus and Saturn because I’ve always had a thing about those rings.”). The only negative thing I recall was him snapping at a member of the audience who asked how much money he made. It finally dawned that the woman sitting next to me was his wife as she was laughing at all the jokes.However, what lodged in my mind the most was a book he’d written with pride: The Castle Keeps (1972). He described it as a way of saying, “This is a wonderful country we have and it’s terrible what some people are doing to it.” He then sadly announced the book hadn’t sold well but terrified “both people who read it”. Several years later, I found it at a used bookstore and read the novel. It was creepy, if somewhat dated. It concerned two families, one living in the city and another in the countryside who do their best to survive in a dystopic scenario where food runs short and motorcycle gangs raid the hinterlands.Flash forward to the early 1980’s. I’m at Marcon, the annual science fiction convention in Columbus, Ohio and I spot Offutt signing books. I strolled over to him and announced, “Hello Mr. Offutt, I’m the third person to have read The Castle Keeps.” He looked up at me, glared and asked what I meant by that statement. Startled, I mumbled something and shuffled away. I made a note to my future self: don’t make snide remarks about a writer’s cherished books.I bring these memories up, as they are the reason I purchased Chris Offutt’s memorial, My Father the Pornographer when it became available in the EBook format. Chris Offutt is the oldest son of Andrew Offutt, who passed in 2012 at the age of 78. Chris Offutt is my age; he was born in 1958. He grew up in Haldeman, Kentucky where his parents lived for fifty years. When I learned of Offutt the Elder’s passing in 2012, I checked and couldn’t find much written by the him since 1985. Even his fantasy and SF writings were not that well known. I knew about his saucy SF series, Spaceway, for Playboy Press under the pseudonym “John Cleve”, but that there was preciously little out there. What had he been doing all these years?It turns out, according to his son Chris, he wrote a ton of adult books for a market which paid nicely. In 1970, when his son Chris needed dental work, he closed his insurance business and proceeded to write full-time. You have to stand in admiration or disbelief at someone who has the tenacity to do that with a family to support. The mood changed at the big house, purchased by the Offutt’s to raise their children in 1964. Suddenly dad was home all the time typing and mom worked at the typewriter too to help him get his manuscripts in on schedule. According to the book, Offutt Senior wrote at a frantic speed on the old electrical and mechanical typewriters that made plenty of noise. His record was 94 pages in three days. Most of the time he was paid by the book and, like Orrie Hitt, needed to keep that typewriter humming away if bills were to be paid.When his father passed, Chris Offutt came into a collection of his dad’s private library and notes. Chris Offutt, an accomplished writer himself, spent a long time cataloguing his dad’s vast accumulation of erotica and adult books.The size of what he found is staggering, but he admonshes the reader of this memoir to remember his parents came up in the depression. They were taught not to throw away anything. He even discovers an adult-themed comic book his dad created over a period of sixty years, which ran over 4000 pages in length. Violent and gruesome, his father never let anyone know of its existence.The memoir is as much an autobiography about the son as it is about his father. Chris Offutt talks about coming of age in the backwoods of Kentucky, how he was tossed from an army career because of a bad physical, his trips to the local bootlegger to purchase his dad’s bourbon and more. I almost quit reading the book when he talked about his molestation by a man in town he refers to as “The fatman”. It’s admirable he can write about this incident forty years later, but I did feel the scars of this abuse still remain.He even dedicates the book to each of his father’s pseudonyms. He lists a complete biography of everything Offutt Senior wrote, at least what he could find. His dad maintained a file of correspondences and it appears he wrote private novels for discrete clients toward the end of his life.Some of the observations on his father and his writing habits are quite fascinating:“My mother told me he quit writing science fiction due to the constraints of physical reality. In fantasy he had greater freedom. His imagination could roam farther without restriction. Fantasy novels are only as successful as the underlying cohesive structure, and Dad devoted a great deal of effort to creating his worlds.”At times, the book is painful. For instance, the passage where he finds one of the Offutt Senior’s early science fiction stories and reads it after his father’s death:“At the end I began to cry. Each time my sobs faded, the emotion forced its way out again. I finally subsided, gasping for breath, drained and clearheaded. I’d kept my grief tightly stowed for months and now felt relieved. I understood that I was mourning my father but not his death. I wept for the talent he had as a young man, the great writer he might have become.”Chris Offutt’s relationship with his father was strained. Although you get the feeling he was loved by his father, Andrew Offutt was distant and seldom left the house after he began writing full time. He constantly barraged his family to be quiet when he wrote and demanded obedience from all of them. This memoir is an effort to come to terms with his father after he died.I give this book a strong recommendation, but not if you are expecting a detailed analysis of the writing process. He does talk about how his father created and the methods he used to keep track of ideas in the days before MS Word. He discovered countless notebooks among his father’s papers. This is personal account, more in line with Brian Herbert’s account of his father in Dreamer of Dune (2003). It is a rare tribute to a professional writer who never graced the bestseller lists and still managed to support his family.[…]

⭐ This is simply one of the best books I’ve ever read. Just a pure pleasure. In terms of memoir, it’s right up there with The Liar’s Club, The Inventors and The Glass Castle. But it’s so much more than a memoir. It’s about passion, dysfunction, ambition, turning your disease into art, collateral damage–and what exactly constitutes literature?Chris Offutt’s fiction is spectacular. His short stories are among the best ever written, IMHO. This memoir is unlike anything you’ll ever read: appalling, heartbreaking, grotesque and funny as hell. Very little is held back. If you like Offutt’s fiction, this book explains damn near everything about him.I am of the opinion that there are far too many memoirs being written out there. I’m wary of the confessional, exhibitionist trend; writing or spoken word events that feature little more than stand-up comedy routines masquerading as first-person essays. Who gives a sh*t?! I’ve led a very interesting life but you can forget me ever turning it into autobiography. Far more interesting to chop it up, let it nourish my fiction and leave it to academics and critics to guess whether or not something actually happened. Fiction is always more interesting. Yet, here we have a story well worth telling and Offutt puts it all out there in the store window. God love him.Above all, if you’re a writer, this book will inspire and chill you to the bone. Every writer will recognize something of themselves in both Chris and his crazy, driven father, Andrew.

⭐ This was an intimate look into the life of a man I knew only in the world of science fiction conventions. The Andy Offutt I knew was only one of many sides to this talented but complicated writer, and I was drawn into the odd dynamics of his family. It would have been a great read even if I had no experience with the man of my own, but having that experience and then reading about all the other facets to his personality was compelling–especially to the psychologist in me. My own parents came from a nearby area of Kentucky, and I am only a little older than Chris Offutt. I can relate to aspects of his childhood while being fascinated by the differences. Excellent writing all around, so I will be reading more by this writer.

⭐ I think we all spend about 1/3 of our lives trying to get away from our parents, 1/3 trying to decide what kind of people we really are and 1/3 trying to figure out how we understand ourselves through the lens of our parents and grandparents. To say the least, Chris Offutt has had an interesting search for the last part of this equation.As an author myself, I find myself increasingly wondering where my influences and ideas come from. And that is what primarily attracted me to this book. In “My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir” Mr. Offutt peels back the onion that was his father. Sometimes he really didn’t like what he found, but he continued to work at it because buried deep in the refuse of a life lived, there are pieces of himself to be understood. The story isn’t only a look at his own father, but an inward look at himself as well.I really enjoyed reading this. It’s well written and highly engaging. Yes, some readers will find his father’s chosen literary subjects detestable. However, many of you will value the search for answers as engaging as I did. He approached the task of dealing with his father’s belongings the way in which an archeologist would deal with trying to piece together part of a lost civilization. In this case the civilization is his own father. And his father’s world, was complex and varied.I got the impression that Chris genuinely respects his father as a writer, although not necessarily the subject matter. His respect comes through in the written word. In the end he discovers some fundamental truths about his father. Interestingly enough, I don’t really think these conclusions are unique. More likely, they are symptomatic of the human experience. We all build offices for ourselves where we feel safe and secure. Places where we are the masters. The form of those sanctuaries take different forms, but they are all sanctuaries of one degree or another.After reading this book, I found myself wondering what they will ultimately find in my office after I’m gone from this planet. What will they find as they leaf through my belongings? I think of the consequences of this book, whether intentional or not, is to make you take a closer look at your own life and realize that after you are gone, your imprint on this world is still very much here on earth.To Mr. Offutt, I say thank you for this look at your father’s life.

⭐ Chris Offutt is one of the finest writers of short stories, novel and memoirs. Why isn’t he a household name? He should be as his writing cuts through to show a Kentucky, a young man and a family in transition. My Father The Pornographer: A Memoir details the 400 plus porn books, the serious Sci Fi and the various articles his father wrote. When he dad grew up he was from a poor family where Andrew was abused by his father but went on to college on a Ford Foundation Fellowship. Chris’ dad could have been a major writer. He wasn’t. He had a sex fetish and made a living writing the 400 plus porrn books while turning out 30 Sci Fi masterpieces. He hung with Piers Anthony and Andrew was president of the Sci Fi Association. But what is the book really about? It concerns the tortured relationship of father and son. A father who loved his son and couldn’t show it. A son who is attempting to come to grips with a loving tyrant. The son, Chris, is an award winning, prolific author at age 58 with a budding reputation. The father simply wrote in a back room, abused the family and died. Chris has moved beyond this and his best writing is in the future. Get Chris’ Kentucky Straight. I had no interest in the book. Someone gave it to me. I finished it in one night.I had never been to Kentucky. Now I know more than I want to about Morehead State and Haldeman. If you haven’t read Chirs other books do. This memoir is a classic. Don’t miss this one. Howard A. DeWitt, Professor Emeritus Ohlone College PS: Warren Johansen is my pseudonym. Chris dad, Andrew had dozens of them.

⭐ Chris Offutt lived in a household in rural Kentucky with two distant, mentally abusive parents he’s tried to please his whole life. His father, a man prone to rages and drinking, was also a noted science fiction author and prolific writer of pornography. His mother was a silent enabler who did nothing to protect her children from this man’s whims and abuses, both parents seeming to prefer abandoning their children at home to participate in conventions that lauded them as celebrities.While this is a heartbreaking book, I’m left to wonder why the author is so desperate to make more out of his relationship with a man who obviously didn’t have the capacity to love anyone but himself and why, in turn, we laud those who continuously show they are undeserving of our efforts. Perhaps that is the ultimate narrative of this sad testimony, but I’m not sure we need to hear it once again so much as evolve past it.

⭐ Above all, this is a book about a man coming to terms with his relationship with his father after he has finally died. The fact that the man coming to terms is a writer with a compelling voice, and the fact that the father was a fascinating case study in abnormal psychology (not to mention an unbelievably prolific writer reminiscent of Kilgore Trout in Vonnegut’s books) makes this book a captivating read from start to finish. Some parts of the book are tough to digest, but as soon as you start to think he’s including certain things for shock value, he goes into analysis or explanation that always justifies the inclusion of anything one might find revolting. Like it or not, this was his reality, and he does a great job coming to terms with it. I’m looking forward to reading Chris Offutt’s works of fiction after reading this.

⭐ Andrew J Offutt was a great writer of science fiction. He produced excellent works that included: Evil is Live Spelled Backwards, The Galactic Rejects, and his best work, The Castle Keeps. Andrew Offutt also had another life, or more to the point seventeen other lives, as a pornographer. Offutt was one of the most prolific porn novelists that ever lived. What began as a way to pay for his sons orthodontics became an industry until the VHS boom of the mid 80’s took it away. His son Chris ( a great writer himself) has penned a brilliant memoir about a man with many lives, and about a fascinating relationship with his father. Read this book!

⭐ As many reviewers have written, this takes a few dark and depressing turns. There’s not much to be done when people are who they are. Make the best of it, I guess. It’s too bad that Chris’ father was like that: fragile ego, easy to anger, distant with his family, not much of a father, and super-obsessed with sexually explicit material – especially large breasted women being tortured, apparently.However, it kept my attention. The memoir is about the son, too. His walks in the woods and occasionally troubled life. It probably needed to be in there, but that wasn’t what fascinated me. I wanted to get to know his father better, what kind of author he was. I got quite a bit of information, but not everything. I suppose, the son only knows so much. That’s probably the way it usually goes.Anyway, I’m off to read some of his dad’s science-fiction and fantasy writing. Being a pseudonym-using, sex-obsessed sci-fi and fantasy author myself (Venger Satanis), I want to read his words for myself. Sorry your father was the way he was, Chris. Thanks for the memoir!

⭐ Until now, I’ve never read anything that left me feeling I’d survived it.Chris Offutt is a brilliant writer and you can tell because it all looks so easy. One of his tweets about writing this book said something like, “Three years and twenty-two drafts.” I can see why. It must have been almost impossible to write about these hard emotional truths; I’m here to tell you it was hard enough READING them. I could relate to more of the situations, fears, and anxieties Offutt writes about than I was ready to admit. And he just drops them on you — Bang! Here’s something unspeakable — right out of a seemingly innocent paragraph on a calm and ordered page. They come down on you like they’re your own memories; they side-swipe you like they’re the terrible things you always tried to forget, but somehow you’d stopped paying attention, and here they are. That’s how I felt the whole time I was reading this book, which was about three days. What must it have been like to write it?This will probably be the book Chris Offutt is remember for. I don’t know how anyone could forget it.

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