Something I think about occasionally is what would have happened if my father has published the novel he was working on, off and on, for much of my childhood. Of course, in order to do that, he would have had to have finished said novel, which to the best of my knowledge never quite happened, but still.
My dad’s frustrated attempts to be a writer are something that comes up in my brain more and more often as I get older, for whatever reason. I honestly have no idea how far he ever really got in his attempts, and I certainly never read anything that he wrote in those directions. (That’s not entirely true; I did read the plays he wrote for the school he taught in, but they were… not that great, and I think intentionally so. I didn’t read any of his serious writing attempts, for want of a better way to put it.) I have vague recollections of seeing things in the office, stacked on top of any number of other papers, but I couldn’t swear to it that I’m remembering correctly or simply imagining it based on what I think I should remember, instead.
I wonder, sometimes, if there was a finished work — even a short story or several, as opposed to a novel — that was amongst the many papers we got rid of after his death, and if a great piece of art was accidentally consigned to the dump. Or, worse, a chance to better understand whoever my dad was by seeing the sides of him he didn’t let out in public or around his family.
That last part is what I really miss from never seeing whatever the work is, if I’m being entirely honest; not in any tragic sense of oh no, I never knew my father he was such a private man, but simply being curious what was there in the bits that we didn’t get to see for obvious reasons. Who knows what the world missed out on? Maybe he was a Scottish Donald Westlake in disguise, or simply someone writing kitchen sink drama punctuated by awkward sex scenes like so many Scottish men of a certain age. I can’t tell which would be more entertaining, from this distance, anymore.