The daughter's dilemma: a collection of revealing essays short on tributes.

The First Man in My Life: Daughters Write About Their Fathers Sandra Martin, editor Penguin 256 pages, softcover ISBN 9780143051176

On the surface, this is a calm, straightforward collection of autobiographical pieces by Canadian women. It has a foreword by Margaret Atwood. Many of the writers are well known as successful journalists or as writers of fiction. The pieces are presented in alphabetical order by author. There is not a whiff, in the title, of drama or scandal; indeed, the collection's editor, Sandra Martin, deliberately chose an anodyne title, one that would not automatically signal incest, as if that might be the only subject worth writing about. No one does.

But what turmoil within. The book begins, the first time, with an apology from Ms. Atwood, who was asked to contribute a piece to the volume--every Canadian anthologist would kill for a contribution by Atwood and she is generous in her response to such requests--but who says, alas, she could not write the piece. She tried, but couldn't; she had more research to do, her thoughts had wandered down an unexpected road ... she offers a poignant poem instead. In her foreword, Atwood speaks tellingly, forebodingly, of the "father-shaped space that must somehow be dealt with ... a stone idol to be toppled, sometimes a locked door to be opened ... a labyrinthine knot to be unraveled ..."

The book begins again. In her introduction, Martin reports that she asked contributors to write about "unbidden revelatory moments"; she was seeking "smart, gripping" narratives, hoping for "reportage from the emotional front lines." Clearly, at one level, a simple, sound journalistic quest. Martin admits that several possible contributors turned her down or failed in their attempts: why do you think we write fiction, said one novelist.

So this is not such a simple assignment, it seems.

The book begins again, with Katherine Ashenburg's piece about her much-loved father's identity and integrity; these are the first two lines:

   I spent my childhood denying that my father was
   Jewish.

      (No, that's not right. A typical exaggeration, and
   misleading.)

So not only is it not easy to write about one's father, it is hard to know what the truth is, and whether or not the daughter remembers correctly, and whether or not she tells or wants to tell the truth to herself and to us. There is doubt about the conflicting memories of siblings and even the impulse to be truthful. (Another reason writers choose fiction ...) There are strategic choices to be made: hagiography or expose, worship or revenge? Some of both are in this collection. There are stone walls to be broken down, messes to be resolved (Camilla Gibb cannot kill off a fictional father until she makes sure her real father is still alive). There is the daunting task of prying secrets from the tightly curled fist of family loyalty. As Iranian-born writer Marina Nemat notes, "silence was an indestructible member of my family."

And then there are the mothers. It is notable how many grownup women still cannot write about their fathers without reference and deference to the huge blocking figure or shadow of the mother. Offspring experience and recall childhood as a triangulated reality, but so often access to the father is through the mother; Martin quotes from Atwood's 1989 novel Cat's Eye: "daytime is ruled by mothers. But fathers come out at night. Darkness brings home the fathers." Those of us who were children in post-war families think that mother-ruled roosts were our special circumstance, but younger writers also allude to this: Emma Richler defers to her mother Florence's preferred language concerning her father's death, or rather "demise"; Emily Urquhart says that it is always her mother, Jane, at the end of the phone, "the medium through which our family channels all unpleasant information ... a gloomy but nevertheless crucial role."

But mothers are not just powerful and loving and supportive. They are alcoholics. They get breast cancer. They suffer from mental illness and brain damage and must be cared for by those fathers. Mothers are enablers: Martin describes being "served up" for beatings to her father by her mother (whose own father gave her a leather razor strop as a wedding present). Writers such as Christie Blatchford and Sarah Murdoch unzip their professional-journalist leather jackets to reveal girls bewildered, terrified, infuriated by their mothers' drunken (a word used sparingly; our mothers drank but we rarely call them drunks) binges. And then (this was always the way) there were the times of being "good," treasured interludes of sweetness and happiness and wit that did not last. These daughters, years and years later, puzzle over their fathers' unstinting love and protection of these mothers: Murdoch was "mystified by his forbearance--and I suppose I still am, thirty years after her death."

The deaths of mothers and fathers. Moments, it seems, that are never, ever forgotten, even when the stories leading to those deaths are blurred and muddled and subject to conscious or unconscious editing. Daughters write with precision and anguish about deaths (road accidents, cancers, botched surgeries, a sudden poorly explained disappearance) that happened 10, 20, 40 years ago. More than 60 years ago, for P.K. Page and yet so clear: "I arrived after an all-night drive and went straight to the hospital. In a bare, aseptic room in a white bed lay a small, crumpled figure."

But fathers are also irresistibly handsome and clever and important and skilled. Lisa Moore's father could build a house and cook rabbit and seal flipper and make pastry and love his family hugely: "what I felt for him was adoration. He was probably flawed ... but he died before I could ever come to believe it." Fathers are larger than life and they wear very big shoes that smart, ambitious daughters (like Susan Swan) try to fill. Novelists such as Swan, Gibb, Moore and Richler play endlessly with their real fathers in their fiction.

There are the mortifications of "smelly sandwiches"--Tina Srebotnjak--and "shandies on the verandah" on Sundays (Page) and hideous Jeb Clampett suspenders (Catherine Gildner). And magical interventions, daughters believing they could save their father from death by performing rituals like writing (Anita Rau Badami) or telepathy (Rebecca Godfrey). There are still many if-onlys; the conversations that never took place, the lingering sense of guilt and responsibility for these sometimes wayward, brutal, absent and silent men.

All 22 pieces are thought provoking, illuminating, although some are still bound by loyalty and propriety. In several cases, it is the daughter still who is writing, not the writer and so the transformation from memory to memoir has not fully taken place. Sometimes, unwittingly, daughters reveal more than they intend about themselves; there are those who still do not acknowledge the impact of those fathers, which as readers we can see in the elisions and rationalizations. Daughters may finally see the sins of the father in his portrait, but not, yet, in the mirror.

Marian Botsford Fraser is a freelance writer and broadcaster. Her most recent book is Requiem for My Brother (Greystone Books, 2006), a family memoir.