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DAD STORIES

$19.95

DAD STORIES is a flash memoir collection about the small violences that girls face at the hands of fathers who don't know how to raise them, who are taught they don’t need to know how to raise girls. This collection is about the visceral absence of semi-present fathers; the way that, even when not there, they dictated the ways their families move. Through chronological vignettes, Fontenot asks over and over again how a daughter is supposed to feel about such a father, about such a childhood, knowing that nothing is simply black and white.

DAD STORIES is a flash memoir collection about the small violences that girls face at the hands of fathers who don't know how to raise them, who are taught they don’t need to know how to raise girls. This collection is about the visceral absence of semi-present fathers; the way that, even when not there, they dictated the ways their families move. Through chronological vignettes, Fontenot asks over and over again how a daughter is supposed to feel about such a father, about such a childhood, knowing that nothing is simply black and white.

Praise for DAD STORIES

They say the measure of a book is how long a person thinks about it after they close the cover. As a Cajun father, this one fully occupied my mind in the hours between readings. Fontenot has found that place in parenting where fathers can be both not enough and too much. What Fontenot does to show how “semi-presence” of a parent, one that goes through some of the parenting motions but is never emotionally accessible, is as damaging as parental absence is surgical in its precision. Told in flash memoir, each piece shows how moments are what make relationships. The stories show what awful injuries dads inflict from their self-indulgence. Especially in a culture which is still full of toxic patriarchy, this writing displays why it is not a privilege for children to be in a father’s life, it is a privilege for us to be in theirs.

TOBY LEBLANC

 

About EMILY FONTENOT

Emily Fontenot is a writer from south Louisiana. Her first book, Hurricanes, Cypress Trees, and Other Synonyms for Home, was published by Press 254 in December 2022. She is the Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Millikin University in Illinois.  An excerpt from her novel-in-progress is now available in South 85 Journal, where it was nominated for the 2022 Best of the Net Anthology. Her fiction has also been published in Quail Bell Magazine, Gone Lawn, The Southwestern Review, and others. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Children, Churches and Daddies and their subsequent home press collections and Hive Avenue Literary Journal.

 

  • Genre: Memoir

    ISBN: 978-1-963115-55-0

    Publication Date: July 22, 2025

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