An humorous and heart-wrenching exploration of the author's relationship with his father, George Plimpton, who remains one of the most beloved figures in American letters.

In My Father’s Son, lauded memoirist and acclaimed essayist Taylor Plimpton examines the whirlwind of coming-of-age with deftness, heart, and a warm wit. After all, most of us, particularly those with a parent who casts a long shadow, go through a meat grinder as we set out to make our own ways in the world. But what is it like when your dad’s shadow is especially long? In Taylor’s case: a bestselling author, curator of one of the world’s great cultural institutions, an actor in several Oscar-winning films, a television pitch man, the subject of a book and a film, and maybe the closest person we have to a real-life Forrest Gump? How can he carve out his own existence with the crushing weight of all that hanging over him? And how on earth is he supposed to write a book about his father when George Plimpton was a great literary master himself?

My Father's Son delves into the core of the love and struggle inherent in the parent-child connection. Filled with glimpses of the author’s own unusual life—from his childhood days of playing football with literary greats like Peter Matthiessen and James Salter and tennis with a U.S. president to an adulthood that has included shooting his father’s ashes up into the sky in a fireworks show—Plimpton embarks on an investigation that is both intimate and universal: that of fathers and sons.

With relentless honesty and insight, Taylor puts under a microscope not just his relationship with his famous father and his fiercely beautiful mother, but also his son, Ollie, a spirited young soul with the same delight in his eyes as the grandfather he never had a chance to meet. Taylor also finds some clarity around more acute questions: How can he himself show up as a parent even though his own parents were often absent? And how can he become a good father knowing that his own father sometimes just wasn’t?

George Plimpton would have turned 100 on March 18th, 2027, and My Father's Son is opportunity to celebrate one of the most extraordinary cultural icons in memory. Penned with deep love and yes, even a certain sense of awe, Plimpton's narrative is a celebration of George not just as a cultural lodestore, but as a father and a man. What is it to be a good parent? And perhaps most crucially, can you somehow become a better parent to your child than your parents were to you?