The Beginning...

Two years before my father died, I happened to come across author Paul Auster for the very first time as a recommendation by a friend of mine. Needless to say, I quickly became a devoted fan of all his books. The first, however, was The Invention of Solitude; a book that changed my relationship with my father forever. I credit this book by igniting the fire that went on to resolve my relationship with my father. Here's a critical passage from the book:

When the father dies, the son becomes his own father and his own son. He looks at his son and sees himself in the face of the boy. He imagines what the boy sees when he looks at him and finds himself becoming his own father. Inexplicably, he is moved by this. It is not just the sight of the boy that moves him, nor even the thought of standing inside his father, but what he sees in the boy of his own vanished past. It is a nostalgia for his own life that he feels, perhaps, a memory of his own boyhood as a son to his father. Inexplicable, he finds himself shaking at that moment with both happiness and sorrow, if this is possible, as if he were going both forward and backward, into the future and into the past. And there are times, often there are times, when these feelings are so strong that his life no longer seems to dwell in the present.