A Literary Prescription for

Fatherhood

For the job nobody hands you a description for.

Fatherhood gets less written about than motherhood and is talked about even less, which leaves a lot of men improvising: working out what kind of father to be from whatever their own father did, and whatever they privately swore they would do differently. It changes shape constantly, from the sleepless first year through the stage where you are the tallest person in the room and know everything, to the strange, quieter business of parenting an adult who no longer needs you the same way. Along the way there is the guilt about work, the fear of turning into your dad, the expectations about providing and being steady, and the fact that plenty of men have nobody at all to talk to about any of it. These books, poems and quotes are for all of that: fathers of new babies and of grown children, men whose own fathers were absent or difficult, and anyone trying to do the job better than it was done for them.

Books Poetry Quotes & Prose

Books

Prescribed reading

Three of these are about being a father, three are about having one, and one is about doing both at the same time, which is the usual situation. They range from a comedian on five children in a two-bedroom flat to McCarthy on a man walking his son across a dead country. There is no advice manual here on purpose.

Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates · 2015

Written as a letter to his fifteen-year-old son, and the most serious book on this list about the thing every father eventually runs into: you cannot make the world safe for your child, and you have to tell them the truth about it anyway. Coates is writing specifically about being Black in America and does not generalise, which is what makes it so exact. Any father who has lain awake working out what to say and how much to withhold will recognise the shape of the problem.

A River Runs Through It

Norman Maclean · 1976

Two brothers, a Presbyterian minister father and the Big Blackfoot river in Montana. Maclean was seventy-four when he wrote it, and it is really about how a family of men who love each other can spend a lifetime unable to say so, communicating instead through fly rods and shared silence. The last page is one of the finest things in American writing. About a hundred pages, and worth reading slowly.

Dad Is Fat

Jim Gaffigan · 2013

Five children in a two-bedroom New York walk-up, written by a stand-up comedian who is clearly running on no sleep. It is very funny and it is on this list for a serious reason: fatherhood books skew earnest, and a lot of what actually happens is farcical. Reading somebody describe the bedtime negotiations you had last night, and finding it ridiculous rather than a personal failure, does more good than most advice.

Of Boys and Men

Richard Reeves · 2022

Reeves lays out what has happened to boys and men across education, work and mental health over the last forty years, and does it without either dismissing the problem or blaming women for it. The chapter on fathers is the one that matters here: his argument is that the old provider role has largely gone and nothing coherent has been offered to replace it, which leaves a lot of men improvising a job nobody has described to them.

To Kill a Mockingbird

Harper Lee · 1960

Atticus Finch has been argued over for sixty years and is still the fictional father most people reach for, largely because of how he parents rather than what he does in the courtroom: he answers Scout’s questions properly, he does not perform authority, and he is visibly the same man at home as he is in public. Read alongside Go Set a Watchman it gets more complicated, which is arguably useful too.

The Road

Cormac McCarthy · 2006

A man and his son walk south through a burnt country, and almost nothing else happens. McCarthy strips fatherhood down to the one irreducible thing — keeping this child alive and human for one more day — and the result is unbearable in places and the most concentrated account of paternal love in modern fiction. Be warned that it is bleak. Fathers tend to find it hits harder than anything else they have read.

Patrimony

Philip Roth · 1991

The other direction: Roth caring for his own father through a brain tumour, cleaning up after him, going through his papers, being a son at fifty-six. It belongs on a fatherhood page because most men are working out how to be a father while simultaneously revising what they think of their own, and Roth is unsparing and unexpectedly tender about both halves of that at once.

Poems about fatherhood

Tender, wry and interrupted

A son who noticed thirty years too late, an exiled Chinese official making a joke at his own expense, and a Victorian poet who cannot get through an ode because his toddler keeps eating things. All three take about a minute.

from “Those Winter Sundays”

Robert Hayden, 1962

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
…
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

The best poem there is about fathers, and it is fourteen lines long. Hayden is writing as a son who did not notice at the time: the fires lit before anyone else was awake, the shoes polished, the whole undemonstrative apparatus of being provided for. The last two lines are a question rather than an answer. Most men read this and think about their own father, and then, uncomfortably, about their own children.

Shop Robert Hayden prints →

“On the Birth of his Son”

Su Tung-p’o, 11th century, translated by Arthur Waley, 1918

Families, when a child is born
Want it to be intelligent.
I, through intelligence,
Having wrecked my whole life,
Only hope the baby will prove
Ignorant and stupid.
Then he will crown a tranquil life
By becoming a Cabinet Minister.

Su Tung-p’o had been exiled twice for saying the wrong thing in the wrong administration, so the joke is at his own expense as much as anybody’s. Eight lines, nine hundred years old, and it is the exact sound of a father who wants his child to have an easier time than he did and knows perfectly well he is being unreasonable about how.

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from “A Parental Ode to My Son”

Thomas Hood, 1837

Thou happy, happy elf!
(But stop, — first let me kiss away that tear—)
Thou tiny image of myself!
(My love, he’s poking peas into his ear!)
Thou merry, laughing sprite!
With spirits feather-light,
Untouched by sorrow, and unsoiled by sin—
(Good heavens! the child is swallowing a pin!)

Hood is trying to write a lofty Victorian ode to his three-year-old and cannot get four lines in without the actual child interrupting. The joke has not aged a day. It is here because so much of fatherhood is exactly this: a genuine surge of feeling, immediately undercut by somebody putting a vegetable somewhere it should not go, and both of those things being true at once.

Shop Thomas Hood prints →

Quotes & Prose

Quotes about fatherhood to keep

Short lines for Father’s Day cards and for two in the morning.

The greatest thing a father can do for his children is to love their mother.

Ann Landers

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When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learnt in seven years.

Mark Twain

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A father is a man who expects his children to be as good as he meant to be.

Carol Coats

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My father didn’t tell me how to live. He lived, and let me watch him do it.

Clarence Budington Kelland

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A father carries pictures where his money used to be.

Steve Martin

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From Georgia

Ten minutes, which is all anyone can promise

A few short practices for the exhausted middle of it, and for the older business of making peace with how you were fathered.

Inner Child Meditation

Guided meditation by Georgia Clare

A gentle practice for comforting the child you once were and easing the old hurts family can leave, so you can meet your people with more peace.

Listen Now For Free

Why One Small Thing Can Change Your Day

A short talk by Georgia Clare

A short talk on how one small, deliberate thing can quietly change the shape of a whole day.

Listen Now For Free

Learning to Belong to the Life You Have

Personal essay by Georgia Clare · The Library

On finding meaning not in some other life you imagined, but in the ordinary, particular one that is actually yours — which is a good deal of what these years ask of a parent.

Read the Essay →

The 21-Day Meditation Course

Guided Meditation Course · Georgia Clare

Three weeks of short, guided meditations — ten minutes a day is about all anyone with young children can promise, and it is enough to make a difference.

Start the 21-Day Course →

Questions people ask

Reading for Fatherhood

Where should I start?

Start with Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates if you want the serious version, or Dad Is Fat by Jim Gaffigan if what you actually need this week is to laugh at the bedtime negotiations. If you would rather have a novel, A River Runs Through It is about a hundred pages and is the great one on fathers and sons who cannot say the thing out loud.

What can I read when I am running on no sleep?

Go to the poems. Thomas Hood’s “A Parental Ode to My Son” is funny and takes a minute, and Su Tung-p’o’s eight lines on the birth of his son have been making exhausted parents laugh for nine hundred years. Dad Is Fat is also built in short chapters for exactly this reason.

Which quotes about fatherhood are worth keeping?

Lines worth keeping include “My father didn’t tell me how to live. He lived, and let me watch him do it” (Clarence Budington Kelland), “A father is a man who expects his children to be as good as he meant to be” (Carol Coats) and Mark Twain on how much his father learnt between his own fourteenth and twenty-first birthdays. You will find these and others in the quotes section above.

What if my own father was absent or difficult?

You are in the majority, and it is one of the reasons this is harder than it looks: most men are working out how to father while also revising what they think of the man who fathered them. Philip Roth’s Patrimony sits squarely in that double bind. Robert Hayden’s poem below is the other side of it, written by a son who only understood what he had been given long after the fact.

Fatherhood

Prescribed reading

Tender, wry and interrupted

Quotes about fatherhood to keep

Ten minutes, which is all anyone can promise

Reading for Fatherhood

Where should I start?

What can I read when I am running on no sleep?

Which quotes about fatherhood are worth keeping?

What if my own father was absent or difficult?

More prescriptions await.