Shortlisted for the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize
Shortlisted for the 2019 BC Book Prize - Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize
**Shortlisted for the 2019 BC Book Prize - Roderick Haig-Brown Regional
Prize
**
From Giller-nominated, award-winning Bill Gaston, a tender, wry, and
unforgettable memoir about alcohol, fishing, and all the things fathers
and sons won't say to each other
Sons clash with fathers, sons find reasons to rebel. And, fairly or
unfairly, sons judge fathers when they take to drinking.
But Bill Gaston and his father could always fish together. When they
were shoulder-to-shoulder, joined in rapt fascination with the world
under their hull, they had what all fathers and sons wish for. Even if
it was temporary, even if much of it would be forgotten along with the
empties.
Returning to the past in his old fishing boat, revisiting the remote
marina where they lived on board and learned to mooch for salmon, Bill
unravels his father's relationship with his father, it too a story
marked by heavy drinking, though one that took a much darker turn.
Learning family secrets his father took to the grave, Gaston comes to
understand his own story anew, realizing that the man his younger self
had been so eager to judge was in fact someone both nobler and more
vulnerable than he had guessed.
Warm, insightful, and often funny, Just Let Me Look at You captures
every father's inexpressible tenderness, and the ways in which the words
for love often come too late for all of us.
