What Does a Father Know?
Tom Lamont's debut novel GOING HOME is a tender revelation
As I told 42 year old writer Tom Lamont when we sat down to talk about his debut novel GOING HOME for Shop Talk with Writers, his book made me cry, ‘a lot’. After two decades of very successful long-form journalism, Lamont found his own way into writing fiction. He tells the story of three men who all have a role in rescuing and parenting a two year old boy who is suddenly alone in the world. Facing the sudden shock of potential responsibility for a child, their responses to this challenge trigger an avalanche of emotions and reflections on what it takes for an adult to be a parent. I love Lamont’s take on fatherhood as a mystery with deep intergenerational roots rather than a clearly mapped out pattern one can easily follow. Drawing on his own experience as a father of two, and his relationship with his own father, he creates a fascinating web of trails leading towards and away from understanding what a father does, and what he knows. ‘How on earth was my father able to be a good father to me when he had no father? Where does the knowledge and the instinct of parenting come from?’ he said.
Where does the knowledge and the instinct of parenting come from?
As a novelist, Lamont has a lyrical touch which infuses his protagonists and their imagined world with tenderness, love and humour. And luminous beauty: as he moves from scene to scene, season to season, written from the perspective of each key character, his eye for the what this world actually looks like adds so much to the reader’s ability to inhabit it: ‘The oaks of Enfield scattered treasure’.
The podcast conversation with Tom Lamont was recorded at his very warm home in North London. His children were still at school but the living room showed their active presence, and some of the toys (his son’s action figures in hilarious heaps) could be seen as illustrations of his child protagonist’s very lively imagination. Writers take their stories from the truth they know, or seek. This author’s deep empathy can be felt in every breath of his bittersweet debut. That his own father passed away as he was writing it adds another dimension to his work, of the less tangible kind.
‘All of fiction is a collective argument for empathy,’ he said, looking at the living room bookshelves. ‘So much is lost when people don’t read novels.’ But he also explained that writing fiction taps into such a different source of creativity that it is not difficult for him to also write his journalism. He works on both, every day.
Tom Lamont’s wife Sophie Elmirst is also a journalist and author. Her recent book MAURICE AND MARALYN: A WHALE, A SHIPWRECK, A LOVE STORY was last year’s winner of the Nero Book Awards (Non-Fiction). It is the true story of a married couple’s relationship being tested during a shipwreck, a love story and adventure in one.
I asked Tom Lamont how the ‘two writers under one roof coexistence’ works in their home? ‘So far, fingers crossed, it’s only been helpful for us both - each having a reader/purple-prose filter/sympathetic ear/free childminder around at all times. Last year, Sophie’s book came out three months before mine, so I was able to test drive the sequence of exciting book launch, first-week newspaper reviews, quieter months as readers find the book at their own speed - before the same things happened to me. It helps to have someone who knows and sympathises with these and other strange pressures, the hidden weirdnesses of a freelance writing life.’
As we wrapped up the very enjoyable and honest interview, having discussed family, crises of mental health and faith, and the way to finding his own narrative voice after several detours, I wondered: will these writing parents’ very young children also become writers? What stories will they tell, and imagine? Based on my conversation with Tom Lamont, I sense they’re imagining them already.
