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83
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
78/100Critics
88/100Scholars
Author:
Lucas Mann
Publisher:
University Of Iowa Press
Date:
May 6, 2024
Lucas Mann turns his attention, tenderness, self-reflection, and humor to contemporary fatherhood. Moving through memoir, lyric essay, literary analysis, and pop culture criticism, Attachments treats the subject of fatherhood with the depth, curiosity, and emotion that it deserves.
What The Reviewers Say
An intense, poetic, and almost uncomfortably honest book.
What Mann’s attempting to do, here and elsewhere in the collection, is metabolize his own experience as a child by way of his life as a parent. Yet, rather than use his child as an object through which to live (or relive, as it were), he engages her with a curiosity that, though jaded by age, remains imbued with possibility.
Parenthood in general, and modern fatherhood in particular, proves to be an ideal subject for Mann’s approach. The strange mix of self-deprecation and self-congratulation produces a figure of humor and even pathos.
While Mann's writerly style, rife with references and quotes from past and contemporary writers, may imply an audience of fellow writers, he consistently offers sublime reflections on the nuances of parent-child relationships.
