Tuesday, April 26, 2016

My Father the Pornographer

My father the pornographer: a memoir / Chris Offutt, 261 p.

I'd heard good things about this book, and I was intrigued because its subject, Andrew J. Offutt, was an author whose fantasy novels I read when I was in high school. I wasn't aware of his second life as a writer of pornography...although, having read this memoir by his son, it's pretty clear that pornography was his primary life, really, and everything else was secondary. It's a fascinating look at a dysfunctional man who arranged his life just so, and forced his family to adapt to his unreasonable requirements. The section discussing pornography-by-mail and how bondage enthusiasts connected with each other before the advent of the internet was interesting too, in a different way.

Andrew J. Offutt was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America for a while in the 1970s, and I particularly enjoyed the description of that organization as "a nearly ungovernable organization of misfits, rebels, and contrarians known for petty grievances and brutally absurd political maneuvering."

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