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    My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir
    My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir
    My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir
    Audiobook7 hours

    My Father, the Pornographer: A Memoir

    Written by Chris Offutt

    Narrated by Jonathan Yen

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    When Andrew Offutt died, his son, Chris, inherited a desk, a rifle, and eighteen hundred pounds of pornographic fiction. Andrew had been considered the "king of twentieth-century smut," with a writing career that began as a strategy to pay for his son's orthodontic needs and soon took on a life of its own, peaking during the 1970s when the commercial popularity of the erotic novel reached its height.



    With his dutiful wife serving as typist, Andrew wrote from their home in the Kentucky hills, locked away in an office no one dared intrude upon. Here he wrote more than four hundred pornographic novels. The more he wrote, the more intense his ambition became and the more difficult it was for his children to be part of his world.



    Over the long summer of 2013, Chris returned to his hometown to help his widowed mother move out of his childhood home. As he began to examine his father's manuscripts, memorabilia, journals, and letters, he realized he finally had an opportunity to gain insight into the difficult, mercurial, sometimes cruel man he'd loved and feared in equal measure. Only in his father's absence could he truly make sense of the man and his legacy.

    Contains mature themes.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 24, 2016
    ISBN9781515974864
    Author

    Chris Offutt

    Chris Offutt is an award-winning author and screenwriter. He worked on the HBO drama True Blood and the Showtime series Weeds. His books include Kentucky Straight, The Same River Twice, The Good Brother, Out of the Woods, and No Heroes: A Memoir of Coming Home. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays, The Best American Short Stories, and many other anthologies. He lives near Oxford, Mississippi.

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    Reviews for My Father, the Pornographer

    4/5

    51 ratings6 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Interesting book. the poor author finds out his father was a narcissist creep.
      I feel sorry for the son
    • 4/5
      Officially speaking, Andrew J. Offutt made his living as a moderately-successful author of pulp science fiction. But Andrew had a secret sideline that was more lucrative than space opera; he was also a prolific, pseudonymous creator of hard-core, violent pornography. After his death from alcohol-induced liver disease, his son, author and screenwriter Chris Offutt did everything he could to understand this domineering, emotionally absent man. The younger Offutt's efforts included interviewing his mother, cleaning out his father's long neglected office, and, most significantly, creating a bibliography of his father's extensive archive of published and unpublished pornographic works. Sadomasochism was more than just a literary specialty for Andrew; it was his obsession. Andrew believed that if he didn't have the release of writing and illustrating shocking stories involving the sexual torture of women, he would have been a serial killer. The narrative shuttles back and forth between Chris Offutt's childhood and the present day. I found the early chapters about Chris Offutt's east Kentucky childhood more compelling than the later chapters that dealt with his father's literary output. In the later chapters Chris Offutt suddenly stops making smooth transitions between paragraphs, a stylistic quirk that gives the narrative a disjointed quality.It's not quite as good as I hoped it would be (I had looked forward to this book for months after I listened to an interview with Chris Offutt on NPR), but I do recommend My Father the Pornographer as a sad, dark, poignant story of a father and son.
    • 4/5
      Sorrowful story of a writer I enjoyed and knew nothing about and the toll it took on his family, told through the eyes of his son. The depiction of the author's childhood in Appalachia seemed horrid growing up at the same time I did.
    • 3/5
      When author Chris Offutt's father dies, he is charged with the caretaking of his estate which consists of an extraordinarily large amount (hundreds) of science fiction and fantasy, but mainly pornographic books and comic books written over a course of 50 years. Based on Offutt's description of his relationship with his father growing up, it is a wonder that he grew into a, hopefully, normal human being. Andrew Offutt was obsessed with sexual perversion, bondage, sado-masochism and pornography from a young age and matured into a man - "monster" might be a better word - who expected everybody to kowtow to his needs and wants, who needed to always be the center of attention, and who tolerated nothing that interfered with his view of life. There is no speculation on the author's part as to how his father became this way, which is unfortunate, because I would have liked to have known. Another question paramount to me is how his mother could have allowed her husband to emotionally and mentally mistreat their four children (and herself) like he did, because surely this was a man that should never have had kids or a wife for that matter. Disturbing.
    • 5/5
      The author knew his father was an incredibly prolific writer, pounding out a stunning amount of Sci-Fi and fantasy through the author's childhood and well into his adulthood. What he did not realize, was the fact that his father also wrote porn and a lot of it, 400-plus books, under different pseudonyms.
      I had read a few good reviews of this memoir but I was not prepared for how deep this story goes and how prickly, domineering and unpleasant his relationship with his father went. After his father died, Offutt began to examine his father's archives, trying to understand this talented and very complex man. This led him down some very dark paths, nearly causing him to have a breakdown.

      I had not heard of Offutt, but he is an author of several books, including other memoirs and story collections, so his writing chops are solid. I highly recommend this one but beware: there are many unsettling moments, along with some disturbing child abuse, that the author was subjected to.
    • 4/5
      MY FATHER, THE PORNOGRAPHER, by Chris Offutt.

      Chris Offutt is a fine writer, but this book is depressing as all hell. In telling the story of his father, a reclusive and distant despot for most of his life who was verbally and emotionally abusive to his children, Offutt often wonders, as he sorts through a mountain of smut, if he'll ever be done with the damage done by his dad. The elder Offutt, who was, for most of his life, a prolific collector and producer of pornography, comes across as a borderline psychotic, a deeply disturbed man. Andrew Offutt did publish some legitimate works - sci-fi and fantasy novels and short stories - but most of the 400-plus books he wrote were straight-up porn. He also worked periodically throughout his adult life on some vilely sadistic and obscene comic books - thousands of pages - which he kept secret, and were discovered only after his death. Chris Offutt, as the oldest son, was left with the task of cleaning out his father's office. It is this job, filled with unpleasant revelations, that forms the core of this dark memoir.

      The Offutt family was obviously a strange and dysfunctional family, but it hadn't started that way. Andrew Offutt began as a salesman, first for Proctor & Gamble, and then, later, he sold insurance. He began writing porn, as the story here tells it, to pay for Chris's orthodontia. But it paid well, and so it became a lifelong career. In between smut books, the elder Offutt continued to write sci-fi and fantasy, and enjoyed a certain popularity in that community, and was often a featured writer/speaker at many conventions. Eventually he 'came out' to those fans as a pornographer too, and it didn't seem to hurt his reputation at all. He and his wife - Chris's mother (who typed Andrew's books) - also apparently embraced the 'swinger' lifestyle of the 70s too, at least for a time. His mother comes across as oddly untouched by all of this, a normal, almost serene presence, especially after her husband dies.

      "Mom was a cipher to me then, and, to some extent, still is. Her standard response to any inquiry was a variation of 'I'm fine' or 'Everything's great' or 'I have no regrets.' ... Her opinions were reflective of Dad's, a kind of psychic mirror. She avoided conflict by keeping her feelings to herself. The result was marital accord."

      In a few alternate chapters, the author gives us a telling glimpse into his childhood in the Kentucky backwoods and hills . Always the smartest kid in his class, he escaped into books, reading encyclopedically. At other times he took to the woods, which seemed more welcoming than his home, where his father demanded silence, so he could work. Although Chris says his father never struck his wife or any of his children, he could be cuttingly cruel in other ways. Chris also tells of a period when he was serially sexually abused by an anonymous 'fatman' in town, a conniving child molester who tried to interest Chris in being in a child porn film. The man always gave Chris money, so he kept it all a dark secret, but paid the price years later in stunted relationships with women, often wondering if perhaps he was gay.

      I could say more, but I'd still end up back where I began. Unlike Offutt's other memoir, THE SAME RIVER TWICE, which I enjoyed immensely, this one remains relentlessly dark. Early in the book, Offutt tells us that he learned early, as a child, to make jokes, and that he could make his father laugh. And yet there are no laughs here. Yes, Offutt is a good writer, but I got the feeling that this book was a kind of dutiful chore, something he felt he needed to do, just as he felt he needed to sort and classify all that porn his father left behind. Was he expiating something? His brother said he'd always been afraid of their father. That they all were. Perhaps Chris Offutt was trying to lay that lifelong fear to rest. I hope he succeeded. This is a compelling read, but it is not an easy one, and certainly not a very happy one. I'm a fan of Chris Offutt's work, so I'm glad I read this painfully honest memoir, because it gave me a detailed look into the darkest corners of a writer's life. I will recommend it, but with obvious reservations.