Our father who wasn't there

BACKGROUND This work as a memoir dealing with questions of traumatic memory relates to other memoirs in this field such as Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking and Raymond Gaita's Romulus my Father. Its form is also influenced by memoirs such as J.M. Coetzee's Boyhood and works investigating the crossing of nonfiction/fiction genres such as Brian Castro's Shanghai Dancing and the prose works of W.G. Sebald (Austerlitz, Rings of Saturn) CONTRIBUTION Using traumatic memory, this research opens up new literary possibilities in the memoir genre. It offers an approach to dealing with suicide and sensitive issues arising from it. The work represents a journey of questioning, discovery, and reflection as the author was only six months old when his father suicided. The author's journey entailed acute sensitivity towards family members in dealing with 'hidden secrets'. As his research proceeded it was both revealing and confronting. In this respect it provides a model for other writers interested in a similar genre of introspection on the one hand, and a broader curiosity and search for truth on the other.SIGNIFICANCE Scribe Publications was Australian Small Publisher of the Year 2006,08, 10. The work's value is attested to by the following indicators: reviewed in Times Literary Supplement, Weekend Australian, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, Courier Mail, Sunday Age, West Australian; the author was invited to speak at the most highly regarded nonfiction conference in the USA, the Bedell NonfictioNow Conference, Iowa City, November 2010, and other writers' events including Sydney, Perth and Byron Bay Writers Festivals, and Writers at the Convent (Melbourne); author interview on ABC Radio National's Life Matters and Book Show. Uniquely, this work is more than a literary memoir: there is a sense in which it is a quasi-psychological study into suicide and traumatic memory. The methodological approach taken is an emerging research area.