Measuring Up
A Memoir of Fathers and Sons
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Canadian journalist Robson (Quinn) reflects on the death of his father and the emotional awakening it inspired in this quietly moving memoir. He begins in 2015, when his 59-year-old father, Rick, suffered a stroke. Though the initial prognosis was positive, swelling in Rick's brain soon killed him. Despite the fact that they'd been very close, Robson always struggled with feelings of inadequacy around Rick, an expert craftsman and contractor whose practical skills never trickled down to his son. "He had assembled the world we lived in and he, quite literally, held it together," writes Robson. In an effort to keep his father's memory alive, he set out to renovate his parents' Toronto home, where his mother still lived. As he works away at the project using his father's tools, he unspools fond recollections of their time together, writing about his father taking him to hockey practice as a boy in the '90s, the "dadest of dad jokes," and the huge impact his father made on others—as seen in one particularly heartrending passage when his father helped a stranger overcome addiction. This powerful story of loss and healing demonstrates the positive difference one life can make.
