Likeness: A Memoir

From the author of the classic The Danger Tree comes a powerful new memoir about a father's love for his dying son--a heart-wrenching but ultimately life-affirming book about fatherhood and identity, love and grief, memory and healing.

When the worst that can happen, happens, the only useful lesson is the knowledge that it can. That's the take-away: a world can actually end, time can actually run out, sadness can prevail. But I didn't know that then, of course. Or, if I knew it, I didn't really believe it.

In David Macfarlane's living room, there hangs a life-size portrait of himself. The portrait, by esteemed Canadian painter John Hartman, has become a portal for David: when he stares into his own eyes, and into the painting's background, an aerial view of his childhood house and hometown of Hamilton, he is transported. The painting evokes vivid memories of what was, what is no more and what will never be. It brings David back to his happy, privileged youth--its depiction of his parents' old swimming pool surrounded by dazzlingly bright light reminds him of how his future felt during those days, when the world seemed full of possibilities. His son Blake's future should feel just as bright. He's young. He's fit. He isn't a smoker. And he really, really wants to create, to live. And yet he's confined to a bed in a bright, white room--as bright as the air surrounding the swimming pool, and yet so different. As Blake undergoes treatment for an aggressive cancer, his father reckons with his past and the future his son may never have.

In achingly beautiful prose, and with profound insight into how we love and grieve and remember, Macfarlane mourns the passing of time as a man in the autumn of his life and as a father who is losing his son. Likeness is a book about fathers and sons that demonstrates the power of memory to transform the tragic into the precious and profound.

DAVID MACFARLANE was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1952. His first book, The Danger Tree, won the Canadian Authors’ Association award for non-fiction. His debut novel, Summer Gone, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and won the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award. He has won numerous National Magazine Awards and a National Newspaper Award. His play, Fishwrap, was produced at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre in 2005, and his most recent novel, The Figures of Beauty, was published in 2013. He lives in Toronto.