Lionel Dahmer's "A Father's Story" An important but unfortunately poorly written work.

When serial killers are apprehended, we hear all about their crimes and the horrible acts they committed. And to a lesser extent, we are get a sense of the victims and their families, but very rarely do we ever hear from the family members of the killers and what they must go through as they are often turned into pariahs for what their children/siblings did. This makes Lionel Dahmer's book A Father's Story such an important work. However, as Dahmer repeatedly states, he has "an analytical mind" so the work tends to toward calculated prose, that gives very little emotional insight into what his experience was like, so that the book boils down to little more than a litany of events from Jeffrey Dahmer's childhood and trial, making it difficult to empathize with him or his wife.

Hoever, Dahmer should be commended for avoiding sensationalism and trying to capitalize off his son's crimes. The book is simply, as the title states, a father's story, sort of Dahmer's way of working through and trying to understand how his son could possibly be capable of the horrible acts he committed.

The book does give some insight into what may have caused Jeffrey Dahmer to become the killer the world know him as. Jeffrey Dahmer was born into a perfect storm of hereditary and environment. Lionel Dahmer bravely confesses his own early experiments with perversity, a long stint as a pyromaniac culminating in almost burning down a neighbors garage, attempting to hypnotize a girl when he was thirteen in the hopes of "having [his] way with her" and his own dissociative personality that was a lesser version of what developed in his son. Also, Jeffrey's birth mother, Joyce was greatly mentally disturbed (what mental disorders she exactly had, Dahmer never states) and was on numerous medications while pregnant with Jeffrey; and Dahmer correctly questions what effect all of this had on his son.

Throughout the book, we sense the immense feeling of guilt Lionel Dahmer feels that he somehow through his own genes and faulty parenting contributed to what his son became, and through this alone are given a glimpse into the suffering the Dahmer family went through.

"So what our poets and storytellers do for us...is explain us-and-the-world, or us-in-the-world." Thomas c Foster HOw to Read Literature Like A Professor