Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of Father and Son

Summer of Deliverance is a powerful and moving memoir of anger, love, and reconciliation between a son and his father. Hailed as a literary genius of his generation, James Dickey created his art and lived his life with a ferocious passion. He was a heavy drinker, a destructive husband and father, a poet of grace and sensitivity, and, after the publication and subsequent film of his novel, Deliverance, a wildly popular literary star. Drawing on letters, notebooks, diaries, and his explicit conversations with his father, Christopher Dickey has crafted a superb memoir of the corrosive effects of fame, a moving remembrance of a crisis that united a family, and an inspiring celebration of love between father and son.

"Christopher Dickey has written a superbly crafted memoir of one of America's most celebrated and most infamous writers, his father, James Dickey. There is bitterness here and the stories of drunkenness and womanizing come to light, but what lies at the heart of the book is the powerful, frequently awkward, and painful love between a father and son. From Christopher's childhood when James Dickey began 'making my head,' to the filming of Deliverance, when the Georgia poet was already more famous than most of the actors on the set, from his second marriage, long after he had become a caricature of himself, to his death bed and reconciliation with his son, James Dickey is an engrossing subject. 'If I didn't call him before eleven o'clock in the morning,' Christopher writes, 'I might as well have not have called him at all. He wouldn't remember or couldn't speak coherently enough.' And, later, 'We were not my father's kind anymore. But we all wanted to believe, still,
that we could be.' In clear-eyed, often moving prose, Christopher Dickey recognizes both his father's demons and the frequent genius of his work. His poetry runs through the book like a time line. '... Come, son, and find me here/In love with the sound of my voice.'" Reviewed by Andrew Witmer, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)

Summer of Deliverance is a powerful and moving memoir of anger, love, and reconciliation between a son and his father. Hailed as a literary genius of his generation, James Dickey created his art and lived his life with a ferocious passion. He was a heavy drinker, a destructive husband and father, a poet of grace and sensitivity, and, after the publication and subsequent film of his novel, Deliverance, a wildly popular literary star. Drawing on letters, notebooks, diaries, and his explicit conversations with his father, Christopher Dickey has crafted a superb memoir of the corrosive effects of fame, a moving remembrance of a crisis that united a family, and an inspiring celebration of love between father and son.

Christopher Dickey, Newsweek's award-winning Paris bureau chief and Middle East editor, reports regularly from Baghdad, Cairo, and Jerusalem, and writes the weekly "Shadowland" column — an inside look at the world of spies and soldiers, guerrillas and suicide bombers — for Newsweek Online. He is the author of Summer of Deliverance, Expats, With the Contras, and the novel Innocent Blood. He lives in Paris.