From acclaimed screenwriter and novelist Tom Matthews comes a high-concept and surprisingly funny novel about a man who must cope with his troubled family after learning a devastating secret.

In Raising the Dad, the dysfunction in John Husted’s family is vexing enough: His marriage has slipped into a state of passionless functionality. His teenage daughter is growing distant and mean. His older brother—a washed-up heavy-metal singer—is fresh out of jail, and their mother may be slipping away to dementia. Things just seemed to veer off course since the death of the family patriarch many years earlier.

But then John is stunned to learn that his father’s fate was not what he had long believed it to be. It falls upon John to decide if he should break the news to his family, knowing that the truth could make the family whole—or smash it to pieces.

Raising the Dad is a small masterpiece that charts the all-too-familiar forces hastening the decline of the average family, and in it Tom Matthews has produced a classic novel of modern life.

 

Tom Matthews wrote the Costa-Gavras film Mad City, starring Dustin Hoffman and John Travolta. His satirical novel Like We Care was published in 2004 to great acclaim. As a journalist, feature writer, and social commentator, his work has appeared in publications across the country. His writing for Milwaukee Magazine earned him Wisconsin’s highest press honors for long form feature writing in 2013 and 2014.