“Hi Daddy”
by Matthew Klam
from the October 14, 2024 issue of The New Yorker
This is, by my count, the third time we’ve gotten a story from Matthew Klam in The New Yorker. I’m sad to say that I don’t think I read the other two, but I’m hoping to do a better job keeping on top of new stories this year, so I’m excited to finally get to know his work a bit.
Here is how “Hi Daddy” begins:
My daughter was going on a trip to Europe that she’d been dreaming about for a year and planning for months, with the boyfriend she’d dumped and then got back together with a few weeks earlier. Lucas was already over there with two friends, and as we drove to the airport I had the feeling that her flying alone across the dark, empty ocean was practice for her real departure, to college, a month from now.
That’s a bit too close to home for me. My oldest is a senior in high school, and I’m not looking forward to that “real departure,” whenever it comes. Perhaps this story will help me? We’ll see!
I look forward to your thoughts below!
Here’s a kind of life I never knew.
The author interview takes care of it for me.
On to something else…
Is Eddie being sarcastic about “a kind of life I never knew” as this is somewhat familiar turf–empty nest syndrome, aging parents, illness–but I liked the quirky way Klam’s narrator spoke and expressed things. He tosses in something amusing occasionally, has moments of self-doubt, sifts through time and memory and kept me quite engaged.
My comment was wholly straightforward. I was never married, never had kids, have never been of the narrator’s family’s class, lifestyle, professions, nor have I much associated with such people, and I’ve never had their types of personalities nor relationships. I’m not dissing them, I just wouldn’t have “fit in. What else? I was never anything like the narrator, nor his father, nor his daughter’s boyfriend. I’ve never visited Europe. I’ve never had an adventure with a horse… I did take care of my parents during their dying years, but I stayed with them, and they were nothing like the narrator’s parents, and there was no dementia.
It’s a good story, I should have acknowledged. Reading such stories is how I get some exposure or knowledge of sorts of lives I never knew.
A funny thing happened when I sat down to read “Hi Daddy” in the issue when it first arrived in my mailbox. I just assumed that the narrator was Leah’s mother! Then, when the character of Marla appeared, I thought they were a lesbian couple. It only dawned on me that the narrator was Leah’s father when he visited his parents and had to remind his dad, who had dementia, that he was his son. I wonder why that happened?
Lee!
I had thought the author interview covered the themes in “Hi Daddy” sufficiently—seems I was mistaken! After reading your comment, I couldn’t resist going back to the story to see whether I could answer your final question. So much for moving on! Will I get around to commenting on the *current story before the next one comes along?
I don’t recall exactly what I thought or didn’t think while I was originally reading the story. One might tend to *suspect the narrator is male because the author has a male name—which is most often the case, but there’s no reason to *assume so. So this time I intentionally went in without prejudice.
The first possible suggestion I noted that the narrator might be Leah’s mother was the statement: “Before taking her to the airport, I’d made her this elaborate dinner, and the kitchen was still a wreck.” That’s only because we may be accustomed to its *still usually being the mother who would do something like this. In general, the narrator continues to seem to have a parenting role we might usually associate more with a mother than a father. But on I read without bias…
There is one detail in this part of the narrative which seems odd. The narrator describes, “sneaking away to pass out like someone who’d crawled through the jungle on his hands and knees…” Note the pronoun “his”. When I was young, masculine pronouns still doubled as having the neutral role in usage, which was understood without the implication of sexism—at least in *my experience at the time—t was practical language feature. The suggestion of sexism grew with feminism, so many people adopted the neutral plurals, such as “their”, when the person’s sex was unknown. “His or her”, et al, are self-conscious and cumbersome, but no one has come up with singular neutral alternatives that catch on. Some use the feminine alternately…
In any case, in “Hi Daddy”, the narrator would presumably know his own sex and would not *need to use the plural or neutral. In a contemporary story, would this be a clue to the narrator’s sex? Or is this “old speak”? *Or: are we talking “transgender” now?
The next possible bias I note is that the narrator describes taking the kind of interest and role in the care of elderly parents that might more often be associated with a woman. This wouldn’t apply to me, because I’m male and had a greater such role in caring for my parents than did the narrator in theirs(?), or his/hers. I also observed that the narrator at this point hasn’t mentioned needing to get back to any “job”, so he/she may be the homemaker, the role traditionally more associated with the wife/mother.
Did any of these contribute to your assumptions, Lee?
Now we come to Marla. I had already been reading with the impression that the narrator was male, so I admit I took Marla to he the wife/mother. Was I being presumptuous? At this point, strictly on the basis of what we don’t actually *know, your assumption could be the case. Or could they be working wife, homemaking husband?
The text exchange between the narrator and Marla requires close attention to be sure who is saying what. Is there a kind of texting where you can watch the other typing? It seems to be Marla refering to Leah calling her (Marla) “Mommy”, so that doesn’t help us… Again the narrator refers to preparing meals. Marla’s “weekends with Leah”… Marla seems to play the (still more commonly) “fatherly” role, and the narrator the “motherly”—but that doesn’t tell us the *sex of the narrator.
Okay, now we come to the narrator reminding his/her father that he/she is his son. Could it be that this is because he/she is trans? Maybe the father forgot about the sex or gender change. And might the narrator’s past relationship with *his father have driven him to want to “be” a *she?
Maybe Marla is trans, too! And/or maybe you were right from the start, Lee; if so, which of them is the mother? Could be neither, and they adopted!
Don’t get me started on the language confusion LBGTQs are causing by appropriating the neutral plural pronouns…
Nowadays, in fiction, we apparently can’t rightly assume *anything; not even that an author would necessarily let us (or maybe even *want us?) to know for sure what’s going on. Or “they” (I mean authors, not trans folks) may simply *neglect to make things clear, with all the many possibilities that would need to be meticulously eliminated in the narrative…
Isn’t it high time we read *all fiction this way?