Books / Lily Dunn
‘Sins of My Father’ – A ‘brutally honest’ insight into an atypical father-daughter relationship
Local Bristol author, Lily Dunn, published Sins of My Father: Daughter, A Cult, A Wild Unravelling on March 17, her debut non-fiction memoir.
The memoir is written in a biographical style with a dual narrative of both Dunn’s father’s colourful life in parallel to Dunn’s response to his absence.
Dunn’s father left his wife and two children when Dunn was just six years old. According to Dunn, her father was a “charismatic person but also a behavioural addict”, who died prematurely of alcoholism.
is needed now More than ever
After leaving Dunn and her sister, her father followed a guru to India where he joined the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh cult with the promise of enlightenment but, instead, fell into a sex addiction followed by prescription drugs and alcohol abuse.
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Dunn says she knew two sides to her father. She grew up with a romanticised image of him as an elusive writer and entrepreneur with whom she would spend her summers in Italy surrounded by his wild and wealthy friends.
However, he was also a delinquent father who abandoned his domestic life for addiction and money-chasing which led to his premature death.
Dunn captures this through two contrasting narratives centred on legacies of shame and the limits of family love.
There is also a third story underpinning the memoir: Dunn’s relationship with her mother. Dunn writes about how this creates a glimmer of normality in her life and a source of unconditional parental love.
Clover Stroud, author of My Wild and Sleepless Nights, described the memoir as “an extraordinary story” that “brilliantly captures the painful truth of impossible love”, and said it was “one of the best memoirs I’ve read in a long time.”
Lily Dunn will be in conversation with Sunday Times bestseller Clover Stroud on May 17 at Gloucester Road Books to discuss her memoir. You can get tickets to the event here.
Main photo: Lily Dunn
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