J. R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself is a story of a son reconstructing a father he never fully knew.

Published posthumously, it begins with Ackerley’s discovery that his respectable businessman father had kept an entire second domestic life largely hidden, including a long-term partner and children unknown to much of the family.

But the book is not really a family scandal memoir, at least not in the cheap sense. Ackerley uses his father as a way into his own life: secrecy, sexuality, class, inheritance, shame, desire, self-invention. Each fact about the father alters the son’s understanding of himself. The father becomes less a solved mystery than a mirror with cracks in it.

The result is one of those memoirs where biography becomes philosophy: how much of another person can ever be known, what families choose not to say, and how much of identity is built around those absences.

Edition / Condition: New York Review Books, New York, 1999. Paperback. Introduction by W. H. Auden. Light shelf wear only; internally clean and unmarked, binding firm. Very good condition.