Bruce Feiler

The first review of THE COUNCIL OF DADS thinks so. (And I think they mean it as a compliment.) From Hemispheres.

BRUCE FEILER—whose books have recounted his adventures teaching in Japan, joining the circus and, in the best-selling Walking the Bible, retracing the steps of Abraham, Moses and other figures from scripture—likes to call himself an “experientialist.” But the experience recounted in his slim but moving new book, The Council of Dads: My Daughters, My Illness, and the Men Who Could Be Me, is one you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.

In July 2008, Feiler, an inveterate walker and world traveler in his mid-40s (“I’ve sprained my ankle on six continents,” he says), was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in his leg. Suddenly fearing he might not have long to live, the father of then-two-year-old twin daughters Tybee and Eden hit upon a unique plan: Like Danny Ocean assembling his perfect heist squad, Feiler would enlist six men, reflecting various aspects of his own personality, as his stand-ins. The hope, he writes, was that “together, collectively, they might help father my potentially fatherless daughters.”

The resulting book is a stirring hybrid: a memoir of Feiler’s cancer treatment coupled with a heartfelt meditation on parenthood, masculinity and living life to its fullest. Combining a chronicle of what he calls his “lost year” (including months of chemo and a 15-hour surgery) with portraits of Feiler’s own father figures and his Council of Dads, it’s honest, heartfelt and exceedingly raw. The book’s power comes in part from Feiler’s willingness to delve into emotions—including feelings of tenderness not only for our children and spouses but between male friends—that aren’t often spoken of with such candor. “There I am with no hair, a scar from here to here, talking to my friends,” the author explains, sitting with a cane in the Brooklyn, New York, apartment he shares with his wife, Linda Rottenberg, and the girls, surrounded by art collected during his years of globe-trotting. “The experience forced me to drop the normal trappings of contemporary life—vanity, pretense, ambition. It was very clarifying. I was still in the twilight of that feeling when I sat down to write the book. I just didn’t care. And it poured off my fingers.”

Interestingly, the result turns out to have less to do with disease than with life itself. While women will undoubtedly find the book fascinating for the light it casts on the vagaries of the male mind, men will almost certainly be moved to reexamine their own roles as fathers and as friends. “I didn’t set out to write a book about being male in America,” Feiler says, “but people keep telling me that’s what I did.”

I just read a beautiful essay by Kevin Helliker about the cost of losing a parent on young children. Interesting stat: Four percent of children lose a parent before age 15, usually a dad. I was surprised that figure was so low. Here’s an excerpt.

Having known my own father for 48 years, I’ve gained perspective from a wife who knew hers for only eight. When I call my 76-year-old dad tomorrow to wish him a happy Father’s Day, he will compliment me on this essay. He reads everything I write.

But without any hope of hearing her father say he is proud, my wife still strives to please him. In her mind, the sound of his voice still echoes, calling her smart, calling her pretty, laughing at her jokes. Twenty-five years after his praise fell silent, being worthy of it still means everything to her. Despite having thrived in the field of journalism — and having received loud hurrahs from her supportive mother — she felt called to follow the path of her father. Last year, she finished law school, passed the bar and entered the practice of law.

The first time I heard her speak about her father I understood that she was in love with him, and at that instant I started falling in love with her. As she gushed about how he had played baseball for a farm club of the Chicago White Sox, how his prosecutorial skills had won him a prestigious award from the U.S. attorney general, how he had posthumously been named one of the outstanding lawyers in Colorado history, what I heard was elation over how much he had loved her. It occurred to me his greatest achievement had been as a father.

Little science exists about the lasting influence of dead fathers, but outcome data suggest that it is powerful. Such data show that children who lose a father fare significantly better than those whose father is alive but not present, and nearly as well as those who never lose theirs. About 4% of American children will lose a parent before the age of 15, and nearly 75% of those losses will involve a father, reflecting the greater vulnerability of men to accident and illness, say bereavement experts. They stress that the loss of a mother can be similarly overcome, especially if the child received professional counseling and sensitive care from the surviving parent.

After years of studying the role of mothers in early life, psychoanalysts are turning with fervor to the influence of fathers. Just last year, an international consortium of Freudian analysts convened a seminar at Columbia University called “The Dead Father,” based in part on the premise that the role of the father in early childhood has been underappreciated. “The father has tended to get left out of the theorizing,” says Stuart Taylor, a Columbia University psychiatrist who helped organize the seminar.