Book Review: Don't Cry For Me

by Sophia Chen

As teens, we can be quick to criticize our parents. They're unempathetic, they're cruel, they don't even make an effort to understand us. I mean, yeah, parenting is hard, but surely they should be better at this after, oh, a decade and a half? But we often don't realize is that many of our parents simply raise us the way they were raised. They may even have experienced their own difficulties as a result of their upbringing, but they perpetuate it for their children because it's the only parenting style they know.

The book Don't Cry for Me by Daniel Black is an apology letter from father to son for just this. Though fictional, the book is heavily inspired by the author's own experience of rejection from his father and his lack of closure after his father developed Alzheimer's Disease and lost all memories of his and his son's difficult relationship. Black, in his introductory author's note, says that Don't Cry for Me is the closure he wishes he had, and the candid heart-to-heart that he was never able to receive from his own father.

The main character, Jacob, was raised in 1940's rural Arkansas by his grandfather, the son of a former slave. His grandfather's parenting style was what might be termed "tough love": as Jacob confides in his letter, "love wasn't a requirement of men in my day." And he was raised in his grandfather's footsteps when it came to manhood -- to show parental and spousal love by providing the basic life needs, to never express affection verbally, and to employ hard discipline to keep children in line.

This worked in the '40s. But, as Jacob reminisces, things began to change between his childhood and his son's. He married, moved to the city, had a child (Isaac, the recipient of the letter), and life was perfect until the world started to shift around him. The civil rights movement began. His wife, Rachel, discovered the power of independence through feminism. His son didn't act like a boy should, didn't like the things a boy should like. Instead of adapting, Jacob only bore down harder. He fought with Rachel when she got home late from the women's shelter, and every time Isaac did something he deemed "feminine," he beat him like his grandfather had beaten him back in Arkansas. When Isaac came out as gay, their relationship was fractured irrevocably. It would never be repaired in Jacob's lifetime.

Don't Cry for Me was, in my opinion, one of the best books I've read this year. It was overall a poetic and deeply mournful book, but it had humorous spots too, and I even learned some things along the way, like about the civil rights movement and of Black Americans' stories after slavery ended. I would recommend Don't Cry for Me to anyone who wants to be deeply moved by the next novel they read.