SHORTLISTED for the 2022 Rakuten Kobo Emerging Writer Prize
"Dan Robson's book is a heart-wrenching portrait of grief. Anyone who
has lost a parent will recognize it, know it intimately as you roll
through the stages and finally come to the realization that a parent's
ultimate gift to a child is showing them how to live."--Tanya Talaga,
bestselling author of Seven Fallen Feathers
A tender memoir of fathers and sons, love and loss, and learning to
fill boots a size too big.
Dan Robson's father is a builder, a fixer. A man whose high-school
education is enough not only to provide for his family, but to build a
successful business. Rick Robson holds things up. When he dies, nothing
in his son's world feels steady anymore. In a very real sense, the home
his father had built is suddenly fragile. Without its natural caretaker,
the house will fall to pieces--and his family shows all the same signs
of crumbling.
Dan is hit especially hard. He knows he is not the man his father was.
Dan never learned the blue-collar skills he admired, because his father
wanted him to pursue his dream of becoming a writer. Now that his father
is gone, the acknowledgment of his sacrifices and the sheer longing to
be close to him again in some way draw Dan to the tools that lie unused
in the garage. So begins Dan's year of learning the skills his father's
hands had long mastered, and trying to fill the steel-toe boots left
behind. Measuring Up is the story of that journey.
Robson picks up where his father left off, working on the house and the
truck, as much for the family as for himself. In much the same way that
Michael Pollan comes to know his house inside-out in A Place of My
Own, Robson learns the mysteries and proud satisfaction of plumbing,
carpentry, wiring, and drywalling, and comes to understand how our homes
are built. He also comes to see how his home was built by his father,
uncovering more than one heartbreaking reminder of the kind of man his
father was, and what he meant to his family.
Tender and unflinching, Measuring Up is a story of love, mourning, and
what it means to use your calloused hands to make the world around you a
better place to live.
