The Imagined Life by Andrew Porter

My favorite read of the year so far.

A Novel That Takes On Life’s Greatest Mystery: Our Parents

In “The Imagined Life,” a writer searches his home state and his buried memories for answers about his long-lost father.

By Rand Richards Cooper |NYTimes - April 15, 2025

Porter’s new novel, “The Imagined Life,” follows Steven Mills, a writer and teacher chasing the mystery of his father, who vanished in 1984 when Steven was 12. A brilliant but unstable English professor, the father — whose name we never learn — had a breakdown after being denied tenure at a liberal-arts college in Southern California, and soon thereafter abandoned his family. The novel alternates between Steve’s recollections of that troubled year and present-day sections in which he drives the California coast to interview colleagues, friends and relatives of his long-lost father. Having recently quit his job and separated from his wife and son, Steve worries that he’s repeating the failures of his errant father; his “biggest fear in life,” he confesses, is that he will “inherit his affliction, his curse.”

Matt