You Never Met My Father

Graeme Sparkes’ father was deployed to Japan a few months after Hiroshima, aged just 18. A few months later, he had a psychotic episode and spent the next four months in a Japanese psychiatric hospital. This Australian memoir by Melbouorne author, Graeme Sparkes, is in the same vein as ‘Angela’s Ashes’. It details the challenges of growing up in the 50s and 60s with a father who had severe mental illness and a gambling addiction. Growing up with a father who was responsible for two sieges, one of them 18 hours, and a second some twenty years later, when he convinced police he had petrol bombs in the house. Sparkes had to get a Freedom of Information order to access all of his late father’s medical records, which were held at Veteran Affairs. What followed was a journey of discovery, grief and compassion, as the story of his father’s mental illness, at a time when support groups and organisations did not exist.

The book is also a way of explaining to his son why he was given away for adoption. The chaos in Sparkes’ life at the time his son was born meant he was unable to care for him. They have since formed a good relationship.

Tony Wright, The Age, wrote:

“[O]ne of Australia’s more vivid memoirs….. a wonderfully crafted and pitilessly honest trip behind the doors of his real life….It is a perceptive sometimes humorous story about the anguish of growing up and not fitting in.”