Messages from My Father

I would imagine that a writer has a hard time believing that whatever he chooses to investigate to write about may not be worth the effort. A real writer knows that he has something to say about almost anything. In this case, Calvin Trillin has taken his perfectly decent and hardworking father and written about him like he was extraordinary; it is a son's privilege to do such a thing, but is it a writer's? When Trillin points out that his father used the phrase "she's no spring chicken" there is a sense that we are meant to believe this was original to Abe Trillin, or at least that it is a striking idiom; of course it is fairly commonplace. There is nothing in the least wrong with having a commonplace father; I think the world would be a better place with more of them. But we don't necessarily need to read books about them.