Just Let Me Look at You

Book excerpt: Shortlisted for the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize Shortlisted for the 2019 BC Book Prize - Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize Shortlisted for the 2019 BC Book Prize - Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize From Giller-nominated, award-winning Bill Gaston, a tender, wry, and unforgettable memoir about alcohol, fishing, and all the things fathers and sons won't say to each other Sons clash with fathers, sons find reasons to rebel. And, fairly or unfairly, sons judge fathers when they take to drinking. But Bill Gaston and his father could always fish together. When they were shoulder-to-shoulder, joined in rapt fascination with the world under their hull, they had what all fathers and sons wish for. Even if it was temporary, even if much of it would be forgotten along with the empties. Returning to the past in his old fishing boat, revisiting the remote marina where they lived on board and learned to mooch for salmon, Bill unravels his father's relationship with his father, it too a story marked by heavy drinking, though one that took a much darker turn. Learning family secrets his father took to the grave, Gaston comes to understand his own story anew, realizing that the man his younger self had been so eager to judge was in fact someone both nobler and more vulnerable than he had guessed. Warm, insightful, and often funny, Just Let Me Look at You captures every father's inexpressible tenderness, and the ways in which the words for love often come too late for all of us.