REVIEW: What My Father and I Don’t Talk About, Edited by Michele Filgate

Reviewed by Brian Watson

Anthologies are an inherently risky business. In What My Father and I Don’t Talk About: 16 Writers Break the Silence (Simon & Schuster; May 2025), editor Michele Filgate builds on the success of her earlier project, What My Mother and I Don’t Talk About, and recruits fifteen other writers to join her in musing about our relationships with our fathers.

Although the risks of such an anthology include an unevenness of results (where some of the essays succeed and others languish), this work suffers from no such issues, and engaged this reader from start to finish.

The included authors offer a wide range of experiences and voices. Among them are personal favorites like Alex Marzano-Lesnevich and Maurice Carlos Ruffin, as well as writers whose work was new to me, including the powerful Susan Muaddi Darraj and Jaquira Díaz. From the title, the reader can infer that the essays will center on regret, but the work collected frequently moves beyond that emotion to bring the reader deeper into a consideration of the complicated ways our fathers love us and we, in turn, love our fathers.

Perhaps I was foolish to review this beautiful collection—my father died when I was fourteen, and the weight of what he and I can’t talk about is ever-present in my psyche—but the strength of these varied essays lies in the depictions of the many different ways we relate to our fathers. Some of the authors speak to what they discovered they had in common with their fathers; Ms. Filgate filters her interactions with her father, for example, through the lens of their shared attention-deficit disorder.

I took particular delight in several of the essays. Jaquira Díaz’s “Un Verano en Nueva York” hauntingly describes a deepening connection with her father, one in which she learns more and more about his past in Puerto Rico and in New York, where he falls in love with Aisha, his first wife. Ms. Díaz recreates this for the reader, using the present tense for greater power: “It happens so fast. They know each other only a few short months when they find out she’s pregnant; all the roommates move out, and she moves into his apartment in Los Sures. Her parents do not approve of her decisions. What kind of future will she have with this stranger who blew into her life like a hurricane?”

Heather Sellers’ “You Knew About That” fascinated this reader with a depiction of her teenage discoveries of (and efforts to ignore) her father’s heterosexual affinity for transvestism. In an era happily saturated with seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race, it is easy to understand Ms. Sellers’ initial conclusions that her father was secretly gay, but as I learned during my years in Japan, transvestism is not an exclusively queer phenomenon, nor does the desire to wear clothes associated with a different gender always connect with a transgender identity. What was most captivating about this essay was not the author’s deeply honest reactions to her father, but how, in the final analysis, her father assumed she never knew about the brassieres he wore, the fingernails he painted, or the dresses in his closet. The reader might therefore wonder: Are the secrets we keep from our children, our parents, ever truly secret?

Susan Muaddi Darraj’s “Baba Peels Apples for Me” is a profoundly moving essay that plots the evolution of a father-daughter relationship within the immigrant, specifically the Palestinian-American immigrant experience, that also beautifully illustrates the universality of love and conflict among parents and their children. The author’s use of the second person makes that universality particularly vivid, although I was also delighted to learn the Arabic equivalent of the evasive no (that in my mother’s mouth was pronounced maybe) is “inshallah,” “if God wills it so.” The essay concludes, painfully and urgently, with a portrait of how father and daughter react to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

“The eldest daughter has a special privilege: I get to see the layers of my father, all his various modes. We will never discuss it explicitly, but I got to grow with him, beside him, in ways others never will. And now, as our fears converge in this horrific war, we, at last, have each other. And we will sit here, and peel apples, and grieve.”

I experienced, perhaps, the deepest connection with Joanna Rakoff’s essay “A Storybook Childhood,” a work that attempts to peel away the mythologies our parents sometimes create. As the author spelunks through her past with both of her parents, a realization dawns: her father’s stories were shared not to lionize his past but to protect his wife’s. After graduating college, the author finally learns some of the truth of her mother’s past, including the fact that her mother had been born out of wedlock, news her father forbade her from broaching with her mother. “My mind could not keep up with this information.” (My connection with the essay is rooted more in the fact that my maternal grandfather was, like Ms. Rakoff’s father, a New Yorker given to fabulation.)

Near the end of the essay, however, Ms. Rakoff shares a conversation with her mother where, at last, she learns much more about her mother’s miserable childhood.

“All those years, a lifetime, I’d believed the stories, the mythology, had been put in place by my father to protect my mother. The silence, the omission, the reinvention.

By my mother’s account, it had been the opposite.

My father had reinvented the world to adhere to his vision, his dream, his ideas of himself.

The stories, and the silence, had ensured his survival.

Just as they ensured mine.”

Let me conclude this review by noting that one of the greatest surprises during my reading of Jiordan Castle’s essay, “In the Direction of Yes,” was a moment where she captured the experience of love with her partner (after speaking to her incarcerated father for the last time): “Life is long and short and full of loss. But there are moments of love so staggering, so specifically yours, you can’t help but feel you’re witnessing a miracle. To someone, you are a miracle.”

What an unexpected affirmation of the miracles in my life—the privilege of loving parents and of a loving spouse. Miracles I rediscovered in reading What My Father and I Don’t Talk About. Miracles, I hope, await you as you read it as well.