Keith Maillard is a fabulous story-teller, the author of fourteen novels, set in both West Virginia and British Columbia, and a consummate scholar who has been teaching English at the University of British Columbia since 1989. I knew that Mallard was born and raised in West Virginia and had lived in Canada since the Vietnam War era, but I didn’t realize either that his father was Canadian or that he never knew his father. This, Maillard’s first non-fiction book, is, like the title suggests, a memoir that seeks to come to grips with being fatherless. “This memoir is an astonishing act of generosity and tenacity, exploring the profound flaws of one family’s dynamics and the resiliency of the human spirit.”- Eden Robinson. “Fatherless is Keith Maillard’s haunting response to that most ancient curse: Why, father, did you desert me? How, father, should I love you?” - Clark Blaise. “Marvelous and brutally honest.” - Marc Harshman.
Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2019. 231 pages. Trade paperback.