Who is this man I call my father? How do I sort out the messy, bubbling mixture of love and fear and respect and anger that I feel for this man? These questions underlie two recent memoirs written by adult children of their respective late fathers—both men whose demanding, difficult, unpredictable personalities make them compelling memoir subjects even as the books expose and enumerate their failures as fathers and human beings.

Bernard Cooper's The Bill from My Father is a heartbreaking, beautifully rendered tale of the final years that Cooper shared with his father after his three older brothers and mother have died. As he struggles to maintain a safe emotional distance from his intractable father while also providing necessary support to his aging parent, Cooper is compelled to revisit, examine and record what scant information he can about his famously recalcitrant dad while also dissecting his own corresponding motives, choices and moods. Throughout, Cooper's interactions with his life partner Brian, a therapist, provides the author an important emotional anchor in his unsteady relationship with his irrational, often antagonistic, father.

Danielle Trussoni's clear-eyed, poetic memoir Falling Through the Earth is the author's attempt to map the terrain of her uneven childhood that was colored by the demands and difficulties originating with her father, an emotionally devastated Vietnam veteran. As a child and adolescent, Danielle--her father's namesake--is drawn into his orbit in order to gain the approval of this demanding, emotionally distant man. As an adult, Trussoni finds her own voice as she moves out into the world to discover herself, including a pilgrimage to Vietnam in order to try to reclaim the pieces of her father that were lost in the years before she was born.

Opinionated, hard-nosed, brusque, with a deep mistrust for authority and riddled by profound insecurities about their place in the world, Edward Cooper and Daniel Trussoni were proudly "self made" men who shared many of the same traits even as they lived very different lives. Edward Cooper was the upwardly mobile son of Russian Jewish immigrants, a high-profile divorce lawyer living with his wife and four sons in Los Angeles. Daniel Trussoni grew up one of twelve children from a working-class Italian family in northern Wisconsin, and after his stint in Vietnam worked as a mason, building his job into a contracting business and eschewing education and social status. What these fathers had in common were rigid, narrow ideas about work, loyalty, money, and family, even as these attitudes fractured familial relationships, alienated their wives and children, and threatened to destroy their independence and their health.

These memoirs are heartfelt attempts by Bernard Cooper and Danielle Trussoni to build a bridge back to reach their respective remote fathers. Writing about their own lives and their respective family histories is the way in which these writers are interjecting words and meaning into shadowy silences that hovered over their childhood and haunt them as adults. Writing about their fathers brings them closer to these elusive men who dominated their lives. In The Bill from My Father, Cooper insists that by writing about his father he is not trying to understand his dad, because that would imply that his father was "static, a done deal, a wrapped package, never slipping out of character or spilling over with contradictions." Instead, by "delving into the riddle of him, I hoped to know his mystery by finer degrees. Through language could I inhabit him as much as he had inhabited me. Through language I could dream that dream called Father"

Cooper's book originally began as a biography project in which he was going to finally document his familial origins and piece together a paternal life story that his father had always refused to divulge despite Bernard's persistent, ongoing questions about his Russian immigrant grandparents and his dad's childhood in Atlantic City. Because his father refuses to cooperate, the book becomes Cooper's meditation upon the silences, gaps, emotional tug of war that pervaded their father/son relationship. Although his father scoffs at Bernard's career as a writer and writing teacher, his dad shows up in New York—after being asked by his son not to come—when Bernard accepts the PEN/Ernest Hemmingway Award. Is this passive aggressive move yet another "check mate" in their relationship, or his father's only way to demonstrate his pride? As his father appears incapable of giving the emotional pat on the back or verbal praise his son has craved his entire life, Bernard is endlessly attempting to unearth and make sense of his father's seemingly contradictory motives and unspoken agendas.

The title of the memoir refers to an actual bill that Cooper receives in the mail from his father—a document that itemizes the cost of Cooper's childhood, totaling approximately two million dollars. Cooper's offended, resentful and taken aback but never confronts his father about it, making the invoice yet another puzzling, hurtful fragment of their relationship for the son to ponder. The bill arrives after a long silence between them, preceded by the father's failed attempt to negotiate with a used car salesman a price of a used Tercel for his son. What does the invoice really represent? Unable to fulfill his promise of buying Bernard a car, Ed Cooper "saves face" by a typical maneuver—turning his potential loss and humiliation into indignation over a transgression by the other person involved and claiming himself as the victim. The bill from his father is not so much a proclamation that "you owe me," but a reckoning of the father's investment in his child expressed in monetary terms—a backward attempt to express his love and investment in his son because he is unable to express those feelings any other way. In this light, the title of the book refers to both his father's expression—deluded as it—of his profound connection to his son as well as his twisted logic, litigious tendencies, and dark humor.

The book also chronicles Cooper's gradually shifting relationship with his aging father. Between their long, stilted silences that could last weeks or years, and his father's questionable relationships with women, Cooper becomes aware of his father's fading independence and must step into assist although neither man can openly acknowledge the vulnerability and impending loss that they are facing. In one particularly poignant moment, Cooper's father proudly passes on the family shield only to have his son point out that "Cooper" was merely the Anglicized version of their real family name that was discarded at Ellis Island. When the son asks the father—his last living source of familial knowledge—about the family's real surname, his father tearfully admits he has forgotten it. Thus the son becomes the authority figure—the voice of reason-- and in the final chapters of the book, the loss of his elderly father is softened by Cooper's growing acceptance—and growing fondness—for the unreasonable, unflappable man who refused to live life on anyone else's terms.

Danielle Trussoni's memoir, Falling through the Earth, is aptly named. As the book begins, Danielle is a tourist in Vietnam and about to descend into an elaborate maze of dark tunnels left over from the war three decades earlier. The descent into the underground city created by the Vietcong is a repetition of her father's numerous death-defying plunges as a Ôtunnel rat' during the war during his missions to search the dangerous caverns for American POWs. Although her father returned to the U.S. with his body intact, his heart, mind and soul were irreparably damaged by the sights and sounds that he encountered above and below ground in Vietnam. Danielle Trussoni's solo trip to Vietnam as a young woman (her father refused to return with her) symbolizes her attempt to explore and make sense of the inner life—the deep, dangerous caverns—of a father she is finding increasingly hard to connect with. Her trip, like her father's time in Vietnam, leaves her shaken and disturbed. The memoir is her way to regain her footing and her sense of self and she tells both of their stories with a relentless desire to examine the truth that never gets in the way of her compassionate authorial voice, part poet and part truth-teller.

Trussoni's memoir is a testament to the damaging, often muffled, legacy of the Vietnam War. Growing up with an alcoholic, emotionally numb father who kept disturbing mementos of his experiences in Vietnam—including photos of dead bodies and a human skull—Trussoni believed that her father's persistence sadness and distance meant that he had never really left Vietnam and that his untreated post-traumatic stress disorder stalked her family at every turn.. "As a girl, I believed the war had taken him from us. It was an amorphous monster that would grab hold and pull us into it, kicking and screaming. Vietnam claimed dad's past, his future, his health, his dreams. It was never satisfied. It came to live in our house, eat dinner at our table, sleep in our beds."

What Daniel Trussoni will talk about to his eldest daughter—in long, rambling monologues at this favorite smoke-filled bar—are the harrowing incidents, near-misses, and descents into the Vietcong tunnels where he was obliged to leave behind his innocence and compassion in order to survive. One day he tells Danielle that he seems himself as a lucky man, one of the Vietnam veterans who did not let the war damage him—"I let it go. I don't keep none of that war with me." Danielle is pained by his inability to see how the war damaged him and she asks "Where is it then, Dad?" He pauses and gives her "a devious look—half love, half malice" and says "I gave that war to you." Unable to let his memories of Vietnam go and yet incapable of moving on, Trussoni's father displaces his dysfunction onto his family members and they each are forced to deal with this unwelcome gift, even as he himself cannot acknowledge its existence.

When Trussoni is 12, her family splits apart when her mother leaves her father for a co-worker who can openly give her the love and support she needs. Trussoni chooses to live with her father—at the time, she sees her mother's filing for divorce as abandonment of the family rather than the desperate act of self-preservation that it is. She joins her dad in a life of hopping through neighborhood bars and eating dinner out of pizza boxes. Her father's unspoken motto that the real mission for each individual is to buck up under pressure, work hard, move on, and defy authority, partly inspires the teenage Danielle and partly alienates her as she struggles to figure out who she will be in the world.

Gradually the author begins to see that her father's inability to communicate and compromise explains why his life is littered with broken marriages, estranged children, and on and off again relationships. Sitting in a diner in the middle of the night with her father, Trussoni has an epiphany: "Once upon a time, I could not have seen my father as rude and mean-spirited and temperamental. I loved him too much, and was too much a part of him, to be critical. But this had begun to change..ÉThe Dad code that had gotten me through my childhood began to unravel. I wondered if my father had ever thought about understanding me. Had he ever tried?"

Thus begins Trussoni's "escape"—she moves in with her mother and goes to college against her father's wishes (he doesn't see college as Ôreal work.'). As she moves away from home and establishes her own moral compass, she learns to create a relationship with him that doesn't deny her own reality, risking his disapproval and long silences. Traveling to Vietnam without him is her move to revisit the place where she lost her father before she was even born, to try to come to terms with the past, and to honor her father's life journey as he struggles with throat cancer that was most likely brought on his exposure to chemicals in Vietnam.

Both The Bill from My Fatherand Falling Through the Earth are thoughtful tributes by authors attempting to examine the knotty strands of a parent/child relationship tangled by loss and love. These memoirs are each an act of sorting out the messy past in order to make sense of that past and move forward. Written by gifted writers, these books capture the voices of wounded children writing to remember a late father in all his flaws and fragility