Fatherhood Quote by Sharon Olds

Craft is the drama hiding inside Sharon Olds's plainspoken sentence. She frames the choice for The Father as structural, almost logistical, but the stakes are emotional: whether grief gets to be linear. Olds is talking about a refusal to compartmentalize. The "earlier books" sound like a life managed in sections, a mind protecting itself with variety, with turns away from the unbearable. Here, she’s describing the moment when that protective architecture starts to feel like evasiveness.

The key is her insistence on perspective: "from the point of view of this speaker, the daughter". Olds doesn't pretend to be omniscient about the father; she claims the daughter as a camera and a wound. That specificity is a kind of ethical boundary. She won’t universalize him into an allegory of Fathers, won’t dilute him by letting the book wander into other subjects as if the central story were just one more theme. The subtext is devotion mixed with accusation: the daughter is the one left to narrate, to keep vigil, to make coherence out of a relationship that likely never offered it cleanly.

Context matters: Olds came up in a confessional lineage where intimacy can tip into spectacle, especially when family is the subject. By emphasizing a single sustained story, she’s also signaling control - not over the father, but over the narrative terms. The book’s form becomes a moral decision: stay with it, don’t flinch, don’t change the channel when it hurts.