Tate Donovan as Carson Drew and Emma Roberts as Nancy Drew in Nancy Drew,Melinda Sue Gordon/The Associated Press
In time for Father’s Day, Globe and Mail staffers share some of their favourite depictions of fatherhood in books, from fictional pops to real-life dads.
The book: Nancy Drew series by Carolyn Keene
The dad: Carson Drew
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Carson Drew is the father many girls wish they had. An esteemed criminal lawyer, he was an upstanding citizen, widow and father to River Heights’ most famous amateur teenage detective. Despite losing her mother at a young age, Nancy never seemed wanting. Her father wisely enlisted the help of housekeeper Hannah Gruen, whom they embraced as family, as he assumed the role of single parent. He was the one adult figure Nancy turned to for advice to crack cases. Supportive, warm and ever reliable, he was well-liked and respected by Nancy’s friends and boyfriend. (Not the type of father to crack terrible dad jokes or otherwise deliberately embarrass his girl in front of her peers.) He gave her an enviable amount of freedom and expressed pride in her sleuthing, even when it sometimes put her in danger; he trusted her abilities. Carson Drew never stole the spotlight. His daughter was the hero of her story. As it should be. - Wency Leung
The book: The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The dad: “The man”
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I read The Road almost a decade before I became a dad. Which meant I could enjoy Cormac McCarthy’s postapocalyptic masterpiece, about an unnamed father and son making their way through a ravaged American landscape plagued by scavengers and cannibals, without having to think about what I would do in a similar situation. A ruined world and becoming a father – both were equally unimaginable. Two sons later, I still think of the book’s father, a model of devotion and patience and courage, and a reminder of the lengths one might go, the steps one might have to take. I would surely not fare as well as him, but I would try. - Mark Medley
The book: Experience by Martin Amis
The dad: Amis
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It might be a bad idea to read novels to learn how to be a good father, because English fiction is packed with (and often inspired by) prickish dads. But if you want a ruthlessly objective, deeply hilarious, crushingly sad, always subtle and unstoppably readable account of the state of continuous surprise that characterizes being a son and a father, read Martin Amis’s memoir, Experience. The book begins with a series of conversations – between Martin, the renowned British novelist who died last month, and his young son Louis, and (decades earlier) between young Martin and his father, the equally famous and rambunctious novelist Kingsley Amis. It ends 432 deft pages later, with Kingsley’s tragic stumble into the sameness of dementia. Along the way you get one of the best descriptions ever written of what it means to be a son, a father, a novelist-father and a novelist’s son. Then, when you’re finished, read Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, for his account of a really sociopathic poppa. Good or bad, decent or disastrous, dads leave a mark. It’s always deeper than you think. - Ian Brown
The book: Dad’s Maybe Book by Tim O’Brien
The dad: O’Brien
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This non-fiction book is a series of letters to the writer’s sons. O’Brien, the author of classics including The Things They Carried and Going after Cacciato, first became a dad in 2003 at 56. Two years later, his younger son was born. The Minnesota native served as a soldier in the Vietnam War, and having children later in life once again put his mortality into sharp focus. He began to write the letters in 2004, when his wife was pregnant with their second child, “to give Timmy and Tad what I have often wished my own father had given me – some scraps of paper signed ‘Love, Dad.’” In Dad’s Maybe Book, O’Brien muses on Hemingway, the power of stories and a legacy of writing about war (he brilliantly notes that his obituary will no doubt brand him as a war author, but he argues he should be labelled a peace author). Mostly, though, he just wants his two sons (something we have in common) to know that he loves them and is proud.- Brennan Higginbotham
The book: To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The dad: Atticus Finch
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I’d like to nominate Atticus Finch from Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. He’s a lonely figure – a widower raising two kids, a highly moral man in a decidedly compromised time and place – but he’s a fully developed character, obviously because he’s the object of the narrator’s intense gaze. His relationship with his children is warm and loving, but he still comes across as slightly distant – at least to his six-year-old daughter, Scout. And that’s the heart of the lesson Atticus imparts to his children: Even a loving father has obligations to the wider world. - Massimo Commanducci
The book: Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
The dad: Otto Frank
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In the worst circumstances, Anne Frank found comfort in her father, Otto. Hiding in close quarters under life-and-death circumstances, Otto was a calm, stabilizing, loving force. “Daddy is always nice to me, and he also understands me,” Anne wrote on Sept. 27, 1942. He was the peacemaker, the leader, the teacher – tutoring Anne, sister Margot and the other teen in hiding with them, Peter, in a range of subjects. Of the eight people in hiding, Otto was the only one to survive, and it was his work that saw the diary published. “Anne would have been so proud if she had lived to see it,” he once wrote. - Marsha Lederman