This dad celebrated with booze, crack, not cigars

Opinion

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This article was published 02/10/2010 (5486 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Superdad

A Memoir of Rebellion, Drugs and Fatherhood

By Christopher Shulgan

Key Porter Books, 286 pages, $30

THIS is a frustrating yet compelling memoir of a troubled man seeking redemption through the process of writing.

Initially, you want to throw this book in the trash, but you can’t, because Toronto author Christopher Shulgan has turned his story of personal conflict into a page-turning thriller.

You just can’t wait to find out what happens to this know-it-all druggie jerk with his beautiful, loving and pregnant wife in Toronto’s hip Queen Street West neighbourhood.

A journalist, filmmaker and playwright, Shulgan is probably best known for his 2008 book Soviet Ambassador. Readers here will be surprised by Shulgan’s tell-all approach, which is an important stage of one’s recovery from drug addiction, though not typically one for public consumption.

Welcome to Shulgan’s crack-smoking world. To understand the why of his addiction, Shulgan provides a how-to manual for all those male members of Toronto’s intelligentsia who are potential crack addicts as a result of their fear of becoming fathers.

Impressively, Shulgan’s captures the real sadness of his addiction and how it clouds his view of fatherhood and responsible adulthood.

He continually rationalizes his need to go out babyless in order to feel like a functioning male. To “be a man, that is, by going out and getting really, really drunk,” he writes. “A bender of Hemingwayesque indulgence seemed the most effective way to assert my masculinity.”

In the beginning Shulgan is able to justify his occasional drug-binging by telling himself that by blowing off steam he will be a better, more attentive father. But the night comes when he finds himself compromising the safety of his newborn child to get drugs.

He stresses that crack wasn’t “the” problem. The problem was “the paradox, the glitch, the incongruity I had in this idea called man.”

Woven through his account, then, is an exploration of his and society’s ideas of maleness and fatherhood.

A surprisingly well-read crack addict, he summons for evidence of maleness the work of Updike, McCarthy, Hemingway and Kesey.

Shulgan takes the reader on an insightful journey into self-destruction that infuriates, inspires and horrifies all at the same time. He offers a delusional perspective of masculinity and fatherhood as justification for his behaviour, and in the end presents a realization that most dads know to be true.

This book will be enjoyed by those who want a story of redemption told in a unique way.

Doug Edmond is a Winnipeg educator and researcher, singer-songwriter and father of two grown children.