An alcoholic, Brautigan was difficult to live with yet, in his daughter's intimate account, comes across as a brilliant, funny, clever artist brought down by the booze he downed by the shedload to silence whatever demons it was that haunted him. Brautigan first told his daughter Ianthe that he wanted to kill himself when she was just nine years old and so, in a sense, she had always lived with his suicide, even before it actually happened. This book is her way of coming to terms with the death of a father that she obviously loved a great deal, despite how difficult he sometimes was to live with. The book, notwithstanding its difficult subject matter, is a wonderfully human account of growing up in the presence of such an uproarious and unconventional man. Ianthe, like her father, writes beautifully, often using very similar conceits to him--very short chapters that are the explication of an odd, unbalancing title; wild metaphors that seem at once inflated or off-kilter and yet which scan surprisingly well. The chapters deal with Ianthe's childhood in Montana, her visits to her father in Japan, and with the ghost of her father, ever present in her dreams and life, as she negotiates his death, bringing up her own child, and the difficult and climatic meeting with Richard's mother, her grandmother, who she never knew. This is a warm, very readable, thought-provoking tribute to an important and neglected writer.--Mark Thwaite