My Father Is a Book: A Memoir of Bernard Malamud - Softcover

JANNA MALAMUD SMITH is author of two New York Times Notable books, A Potent Spell and Private Matters, which was a Barnes and Noble “Discover Great New Writers” pick. She has written for the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and the Threepenny Review, among other publications. A practicing psychotherapist, she lives with her husband and two children in Massachusetts.

This memoir exquisitely captures "the particular psychic pleasure and confusion" of being the daughter of novelist/short-story writer Bernard Malamud.
Kirkus Reviews, Starred

"Beautiful memoir...a profound portrait of a loving father." Publishers Weekly, Starred

Thoughtful, affecting memoir...a book worthy of the man.
The Washington Post

How strange... to feel the need to remark that a generous-spirited, relatively unsensationalistic memoir can achieve "compelling" status The San Francisco Chronicle

Smith is a passionate and uncompromising truth-teller Los Angeles Times

"My Father Is a Book" does what the best reminiscences of artists do: It leads us back to the work Boston Globe

Beautifully written...In "My Father Is a Book," [Smith's] insightful eloquence takes pride of place alongside her father's.
Newsday

Analytical without being acrimonious, honest without wallowing in self-preening exposure, this is a wise, generous book full of insights.
Christian Science Monitor

Smith is particularly adept at drawing parallels between the life and the art [of Malamud] Columbus Dispatch

[An] intelligent, loving, yet clear-eyed memoir The Denver Post

Smith has done a remarkable job of explaining her father without ever subjecting him to humiliation.
Buffalo News