In the Shadow of the Valley: A Memoir

by Bobi Conn

He was the only real hero I ever heard of as a child, and his legacy still haunts us. I wonder whether any of our men were ever good, whether any of them ever loved their children or touched their wives with tenderness. I wonder whether the women were gentle, or whether their hollow expressions accurately reflect their despair, their loneliness, their sense of futility. I wonder what they passed down to me—my blurred vision, my thin frame, my long fingers, my penchant for superstition, my longing for green hills and cliff faces? I want their stories, so I can write my backstory. I want their names, their loves, their longings, their addictions, and their brutalities. I want them to whisper to me their heroic moments, their indiscretions, their final regrets, and the recognitions that filled their eyes in the moments before death. But the storyteller was always my father, the original unreliable narrator. Drunk, drugged, lost.