A Bittersweet, Keening Goneness
There are lots of memoirs out there in which a writer chronicles a troubled relationship with a parent. This is the opposite of that.
My dad, Jerry Hirshberg, was a world-class auto-designer who had no interest in cars, and considered himself a painter. A spectacular classical clarinetist who was also (literally, if briefly) a rock star. A people-loving hermit. A secret curmudgeon who didn’t just radiate joy but generated it in so many of the people who knew him. And a pretty terrific dad to both his very different sons. Including this older, more alien one.
A Bittersweet, Keening Goneness is a collection of essays that examines and celebrates the relationship I was so lucky to have with him.. It’s also about having a relationship to creativity and art, and what that costs, and what it offers, and the ways in which it is and isn’t sharable, even with the people you love the most.
The essays are framed and inspired by the card catalog he kept, annotating most of the music and movies he consumed throughout his life. At the moment, it’s more a book-in-progress than a book. If and when it does become a physical object– which is not only what he would have preferred, but the only way he way he would have read it–I would want it done right, with full-color, high-quality reproductions of some of his art, and also the notecards.
The links below are to the original Substack versions of the essays, where, for now, they are freely readable to everyone. There are still a few more pieces I’d want to write for the final product. But this is the core of it. They don’t do him justice.
I loved writing them.
A Bittersweet, Keening Goneness:
Pt. 4– The Meaning of Life, Period