Aged thirteen, Molly Brodak arrived home to discover that her father had been arrested for pulling over a dozen bank robberies in the Detroit area. After seven years in jail, he set up a new home with her older sister and remarried. A couple of years went by before he defrauded his older daughter and began robbing banks again.
With her father currently serving a 25 year sentence, Brodak's memoir - the first section of which appeared in Granta's Summer 2015 issue - tackles the most fundamental relationship of all: the one between parents and children.
In cinematic prose, Brodak takes the reader back through the maze of childhood and youth, carefully investigating its significant twists, and asks: how do we navigate that most formative of relationships once the bonds of respect and trust have been severed? What moments in childhood come back to shape us as adults? And how can so much distance insinuate itself into what should be the closest attachment of all? Confronted with the results of utter recklessness, she finds there can still be space for forgiveness.
