Fatherhood Quote by Hugh Leonard

Grief doesn’t just erase a person; it can finally make them legible. Hugh Leonard’s line lands because it admits a quietly scandalous truth: intimacy is sometimes a posthumous achievement. “My father I liked” is a deliberately modest verb choice, emotionally correct but incomplete. Like is polite, manageable, the kind of feeling you can hold without demanding answers. Love would be too easy, too redemptive. Like leaves room for distance, irritation, and the ordinary bafflement children carry about their parents.

The sting comes in the pivot: “only after his death” is not a sentimental cue but a moral complication. Death closes the possibility of clarification, apology, confrontation. It also removes the father’s agency, turning him into material. Leonard doesn’t claim he suddenly understood his father through memory; he “got to know him by writing the play.” Writing becomes an investigative act, an autopsy conducted with dialogue. The play isn’t a tribute; it’s a method: you build a person out of scenes, motives, and contradictions until the character starts resisting you - and that resistance is the closest thing to meeting the real man.

There’s subtextual guilt in the timing, and a defense of art’s intrusive power. Leonard is confessing that the stage can do what family life often can’t: force specificity. In a culture that treats autobiography as authenticity, he’s pointing to something harsher and more interesting: you may need craftsmanship - structure, selection, invention - to reach a truth you couldn’t access while everyone was still alive and hiding behind their roles.