Edward Cooper is a hard man to know.Dour and exuberant by turns, his moods dictate the always uncertain climate of the Cooper household.Balding, octogenarian, and partial to a polyester jumpsuit, Edward Cooper makes an unlikely literary muse.But to his son he looms larger than life, an overwhelming and baffling presence.Edward's ambivalent regard for his son is the springboard from which this deeply intelligent memoir takes flight.By the time the author receives his inheritance (which includes a message his father taped to the underside of a safe deposit box), and sees the surprising epitaph inscribed on his father's headstone, The Bill from My Father has become a penetrating meditation on both monetary and emotional indebtedness, and on the mysterious nature of memory and love.
Amazon Sales Rank: #1249598 in Books Published on: 2006-01-31 Original language: English Number of items: 1 Binding: Hardcover 256 pages
From Publishers Weekly Cooper, whose Maps to Anywhere won the PEN/Ernest Hemingway Award, crafts a brusquely tender elegy to his baffling father, Edward, who died in 2000 (the book's title refers to an itemized bill of expenses incurred from upbringing and mailed from father to son).Edward was a blustery Los Angeles divorce lawyer with a flair for drama in and out of court.Circling from recent to distant past, Cooper recalls his utter bewilderment at his father's ill-advised imbroglios, which included an affair with his father's evangelical nurse and a lawsuit against the phone company.With a sharp scalpel of detail, Cooper dissects his father's stinging dismissals and unceremonious reconciliations with his sole surviving progeny, laboring to slice away a mystique that "ballooned into myth" in Edward's sustained absences.Dear old dad never bothered to read his son's prize-winning work, in which he figures prominentlythough it's clear that father and son share a linguistic legerdemain.Stirring yet never saccharine, this memoir excavates a fraught history without once collapsing into clichГ©.As much as Cooper seeks truth, he finally grows comfortable in the shadowy depths of his father's legacy."By delving into the riddle of him, I hoped to know his mystery by finer degrees." Copyright В© Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc.All rights reserved.From Booklist Cooper's midlife coming-of-age story was undertaken after a New York editor read his essay about his father and encouraged a book.Dad, a former L.A.attorney specializing in high-profile divorces until retirement at 86, had "glided downtown each weekday morning in a white Cadillac, his fingernails buffed to a high gloss, his briefcase embossed with interlocking letters, ESC, for Edward Samuel Cooper," and thought of his sole surviving son's writing as a hobby.He hoped Bernard would one day abandon teaching freshman composition for a real job but consented to interviews for this book, thereby setting in motion a humorous, wrenching, but never boring exploration of a frustrating father-son relationship.Bernard's deceased brothers had pleased their father by becoming lawyers or private investigators, joining Dad's firm, and being heterosexual.Bernard did none of that and has to come to terms with the philandering, curmudgeonly father he wishes would grant even token approval instead of the itemized, two-million-dollar bill he'd once sent Bernard for his upbringing.And you thought your father was something else!Whitney ScottCopyright В© American Library Association.All rights reserved Review "Bernard Cooper's The Bill From My Father is a glorious cornucopia of love and pain.Not only is Cooper an exemplary writer but he can parse an emotion down to its most resonant note.This memoir amazes." -- Alice Sebold"A masterful, compelling, and supremely entertaining portait.Some books are easily forgotten, but not this one.I will never be able to look at a coat of arms, a sheet of onionskin, or a cemetary again without feeling the need to tell someone about Edward Cooper." -- Mark Salzman
Client more useful on 21 of 23 people found this review helpful.Bernard Cooper is a genius!By Deborah A.Lott James Frey Who needs that make up the sensational details and when we call memory, Bernard Cooper with the brilliant writing is fantastic ordinary experience, slowing the flow of time that is our daily life to find the more poignant the more eloquent, more in- -danger-to-be-lost forever when the narrative and makes it sublime?If you want to see what his best memory is able to do, read the bill of my Father.In it, Cooper captures the universal mystery of having parents: how could these people at the same time as us, and so completely alien to us?As both parents may appear as we could, and as arbitrary, as if the stork dropped us off at the door by chance?This book is hysterically funny, terribly sad, and heart painfully beautiful.Bravo.8 of 9 people found the following review helpful Wow!Imagine having a father like this ....K.Corn This book just goes to show that a parent can often seem like a strange, confusing and mysterious.Bernard Cooper's father was a real mystery and it's up to Cooper to try something meaningful out of his very difficult relationship with his father, a man who can be very annoying and yes, abuse ...but Cooper refuses to give him.This is an intense book and I just hope that the shadow James Frey (A Million Little Pieces) memoir genre has not thrown over people stop reading here.5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.Mr.Cooper, your love for your father appeared throughout your prose, although he billed you for $ 2 million and accused the family of Jessica Lux Cooper published his memoirs about his relationship with his father for ten years after an editor suggested topic.The editor was inspired by an essay about his eccentric Cooper's father, an essay by writer desperate to hide his father tried, for fear of being angered by her revelations Cooper clearly distressed by his portrait of his father - how to talk around a flawed human being angry , sarcastic and eccentric in a positive life, without demonizing him?Well, Mr.Cooper, if anyone tells you, but let me say loud and clear: his love for his father shone through his prose, which he billed for $ 2 million, which he did to all members of the family, and which he was suspended for minor offenses.As I reader, I have come to love and respect his father, with all its quirks included.Edward Cooper loom larger than life.Their status with the telephone company reveals all - the author's father (Edward) had a phone bill for a thousand dollars because of that call a televangelist recommended by your nurse / girlfriend, but he refused to pay.He became involved in one month-long battle with the telephone company, threatening litigation (Edward was a well-known divorce lawyer in Los Angeles back in the day) As a last resort, a telephone counselor called the son of Edward, our author, who was heard as a emergency contact on the account.The author asks the decision to his son Edward sit-around-and-daydream/write as a contact list: "He did have a neighbor, because of the long rivalry with the neighbors on the right, because you did sprinklers soaked the lawn on his side of the property line, and the neighbors on the left, because he was sure to open the automatic garage intense enough to cause cracks in the walls of our room vibrated.Even when he came to my name after the exclusion of half of Los Angeles, I was chosen, honored, acquitted."[P 77] No summary Bernard complex relationship with his father and older brothers for decades, this book justice.Bernard was an accomplished writer, before embarking on the most difficult of his career - his father's portrait in the written word is all I can.
Brain and Skin Cells Transformed into Heart Muscle
