My Father, the Pornographer

Growing up in the Kentucky hills, boys ended up doing what their father did: a plumber's son became a plumber, a writer's son, like Offutt, became a writer. But only after his dad's death in 2013 did Offutt, an acclaimed novelist and memoirist, discover what kind of writing his father had been doing: four hundred novels, nearly all of them pornographic, and a vast, unpublished comic-book epic so fanatically explicit that it makes Henry Darger's paintings look like Family Circus. You won't need a brown wrapper to read this memoir—it's sober rather than salacious—but it's a fascinating, moving portrait of obsessive creativity and tyrannical fatherhood and the lives lived in their shadows, especially that of Offutt's mother, the best character in the book.