Daddy Boy by Emerson Whitney

Daddy Boy, Cipher Press, 2023

Daddy Boy is the kinda book I like to read.

It’s discursive, it’s non-fictional, it’s digressive, it offers insight into a topic I know nothing about alongside autobiographical details… it engages with issues of identity and community and it does so throughout in a moving, engaging, articulate and intellectual way.

In short, it’s exactly my kinda thing and I thoroughly loved it…

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Emerson Whitney is an American essayist, poet and (maybe) novelist and though I haven’t read his work before, if I ever have disposable income again (currently I don’t have disposable income as I’m a full time parent for my tiny adorable infant baby – donate cash here) then I will be ordering the rest.

Yes. Yes. Yes. There’s that blunt, over-honesty here that I love to see.

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Daddy Boy is about many things, and many moments in a life, but uses a two week trip on a queer-friendly tornado hunting bus tour as a framing device, from which memories fall. Like in B.S. Johnson’s Trawl, the writer/academic is taking the trip in order to write, to be inspired, but unlike B.S. Johnson’s Trawl, Whitney hasn’t sorted out a publisher for the projected text in advance, and is on the trip for free with the promise that his writing will function as good advertising for the tour guide.

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Why this trip? Why at this moment in Whitney’s life?

Well, the timing question is easy: Whitney is going through a divorce, so there’s a lot to think about…

This collapsed marriage lasted essentially from the end of his teenage years through his early 30s, and very much covered all the time with much/most of his formative experiences in terms of both gender and sexual identity. The relationship was deeply rooted in kink and BDSM, as Whitney’s ex-wife was a professional dominatrix and their relationship initially became sexualised when she invited Whitney, a then friend, to join in some of her client sessions (because sometimes submissives want extra people in the room).

Daddy Boy, then, describes this trip in a minibus (careening around the central parts of the United States with a group of [mostly British (boooo)] tourists), intersected with memorialisations and excavations of this relationship, of the ex-wife as a maternal figure, memories of Whitney’s actual mother (who was far from capable as a maternal figure), and also memories about Hank, who was Whitney’s unstable mother’s most stable on-again-off-again partner and for many years was the primary carer for Whitney. The continuing parental relationship with Hank is depicted as a hopeful, if not unflawed, part of Whitney’s adult life, and gentle moments of connection between the two of them have a real emotional heft.

Elsewhere, there are interesting conversations about weather and meteorology and storm-chasing and how these all became long-standing interests… there are recollections of uncomfortable-sounding BDSM sex practices… there are positive and negative memories of childhood and youth, before the writer arrived into the queer kink party scene as a very young adult, and then didn’t really depart until the divorce… And, instead of – as many divorcees do – diving into sex, Whitney does the opposite, and dives into… storm chasing…

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Daddy Boy is ultimately about powerlessness… The use of relationships (including familial ones) as a way to avoid taking responsibility for the self, and the touristic pursuit of extreme weather are both similarly unconstructive acts… They come from a similar urge and feeling: we are all ultimately powerless in the face of extreme weather events, just as, as individuals, we are powerless against broader sociocultural movements, and the whims of those more powerful than us, as individuals…

Sometimes an out-of-routine hit of adrenaline allows us to feel like maybe we could fight or fly from the moments we instead passively struggle through. But no. But no…

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There are no guaranteed tornadoes on tornado chasing tours, just as there are no guaranteed moments of happiness, love and affection in a life.

A tornado can tear things apart and ruin a sense of stability, but it can also be beautiful to watch… compelling, sucking one in and not letting a person out until they’ve been destroyed, disarmed, and left raw and unsure of who and what and where they are…

And that’s also how relationships can function. And not all domineering and unhealthy relationships contain physical and sexual domination as the relationship depicted here does, just as not all kink is inherently exploitative! Kink is usually play, while exploitation never is.

… a toxic relationship doesn’t necessarily prevent someone from finding more of a sense of self or a purpose while within it, but it is likely to delay or stop the facility to act on that self-knowledge. How and when a relationship is (or becomes) controlling isn’t clear-cut and blunt. Good things can happen in a bad relationship. And the other way around.

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What a reader gets with Daddy Boy is not a catalogue of regrets, but a catalogue of memories. The reader plays witness to weather, to people, to places, to parties, to relationships, all in the past, and to a present that contains nothing but the pursuit of tornadoes.

And the tornadoes, as promised by the meteorologist hosting the tour, are always just over the next horizon…

This is a book about the pursuit of freedom, selfhood, and comfort, as much as it’s about the pursuit of tornadoes.

I loved it, I found it deeply moving, but also deeply upsetting, because there was a familiarity to some moments… it’s not fun to remember how one’s self can be erased and eroded by others, or ignored and denied… Agh

This is a beautiful book, it really is, and I’ll absolutely be reading more Emerson Whitney when (if ever) I have first-hand-book buying money again.

Thank you!

Order Daddy Boy direct from Cipher Press via this link.