Until I Find You by John Irving

[Dorothea]

I know there only seem to be a few of us, but...
I've never done a book club type of thing before, so I guess I wouldn't know where to start.
NYC wife, I was wondering, you had mentioned that this book had personal significance to you. Did you want to talk about that some, or is that not a good thing to talk about?

[NYCwife]

Oh.....well yes, it did have some personal significance, though after I wrote that I was hoping that no one took that to mean that I was molested, but it is significant to me in that the main character Jack Burns has this search for his father that preoccupies his early childhood and is somewhat revelatory to him as an adult.

I didn't find out that my father was not my birth father until 2004, and I have been preoccupied with it ever since. The man who I believed to be my father wasn't in my life, so it wasn't like hearing, well...your daddy ain't your daddy, but it was still quite a shock, even though I felt like, "Aha....that makes sense."

So I can in many ways relate to the idea of searching for one's father and to John Irving's own family situation, which he discusses in the epilogue.

I think some of the main themes in the novel are the tenuousness (is that a word?...lol) of memory, the twisted versions of truth and the shallowness of geneaology when surrounded by half-truths and family lore.

nycgrrl