In the Early Times: A Life Reframed

Acclaimed New Yorker staff writer Tad Friend reflects on the pressures of middle age, exploring his relationship with his dying father as he raises two children of his own.

Is the father I wanted the father my children want me to be, too? Or is the father I got the father I've inevitably become?
Almost everyone yearns to know their parents more thoroughly before they die, to solve some of those lifelong mysteries. Maybe, just maybe, those answers will help you live your own life. But life doesn't stop to wait. In his fifties, writer Tad Friend is grappling with being a husband and father and trying to grasp who he is as a son. Torn between two families, he careens between two stages in life. On some days he feels vigorous, on the brink of greatness when he plays tournament squash. On others, he feels distinctly old, troubled by his yawning distance from millennial sensibilities or by his own face in the mirror, by a grimace that's so like his father's.
Theodore Friend, an erudite historian and the former president of Swarthmore College, was gregarious and charming with strangers yet cerebral with his children. Tad writes that "trying to reach him in any deeper way always felt like ice fishing." Yet now Tad's father, known to his family as Day, seems concerned chiefly with the flavor of ice cream in his bowl and, when pushed, interested only in reconsidering his view of Franklin Roosevelt.
Then Tad finds his father's files, a trove of passionate confessions that reveals a man entirely different from and more complex than the exasperatingly logical father Day was so determined to be. It turns out that Tad has been behaving self-destructively in the same way Day was--a secret each kept from everyone, even themselves. These discoveries make Tad reconsider his own role, both as a father and a son. But is it too late for both of them?
Witty, searching, and profound, In the Early Times is an enduring meditation on the shifting tides of memory and the unsteady pillars on which every family rests.