My Father Bryce cover art

My Father Bryce

 Preview
Try Standard free
Select 1 audiobook a month from our entire collection.
Listen to your selected audiobooks as long as you're a member.
Get unlimited access to bingeable podcasts.
Auto-renews at $8.99/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

My Father Bryce

By: Adam Courtenay
Narrated by: Paul English
Try Standard free

Auto-renews at $8.99/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $30.34

Buy Now for $30.34

About this listen

 Dynamic, complex, driven: Bryce Courtenay was all of these as well as one of Australia's most beloved authors. To his son Adam, he was larger than life, mercurial, and impossible to know completely. In this moving, unforgettable memoir, Adam searches for the real Bryce.

Bryce Courtenay was one of Australia's highest-selling and most-loved authors as well as a larger-than-life character. From his first book, The Power of One, he captivated readers. With his third, the non-fiction title April Fool's Day, he captured their hearts. Many of his fans would have thought they knew him, and they did - they knew the version of him that he wanted to present to the world.

Bryce's son Adam also knew that version. And he knew the Bryce the rest of the world only glimpsed, or never saw at all. His father was a natural born storyteller and occasional fabulist whose tales never quite felt true. He was a man who forever publicly grieved the loss of his son Damon, the subject of April Fool's Day, but who seemed reluctant to connect with his remaining two sons.

Several years after his death, Bryce still looms large in Adam's life. In seeking to understand his father, who made so many people happy with his books, Adam recounts his own 1960s and 1970s childhood, Bryce's career in advertising and his metamorphosis into bestselling novelist. In the years after The Power of One, Bryce became a household name even as his personal life was plagued by tragedy and heartbreak - some of his own making. All the while Adam did his best to love his father and hang on through the wild ride of his life. Art & Literature Authors Heartfelt
All stars
Most relevant
It was nice to hear of Bryce's failings as well as his super powers. A very interesting life and read.

Enlightening

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
I’ve always wondered what the truth was behind Bryce the mega author. This book is beautifully written and I wound up with mixed feelings. Can’t decide whether to adore or abhor him. Adam has written a touching book about a tricky father son relationship, clearing up the facts on a lot of fiction.

About time

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
At first, the hype around this book made it seem like it would finally bring to account a man who spent his life hiding from his own demons and, without realising it, created a few more along the way. What unfolds instead is a story as old as time. In many families there is the favoured child and the child who mirrors a parent so closely that they clash. Then there is the sick child who becomes the centre of gravity, pushing everyone else into new roles while the household tries to cope, adjust and survive.

Serious illness in a child does not only affect the child. It reshapes the whole family, both during the illness and long after. Parenting is hard enough when you have not resolved your own childhood wounds, and doing so while caring for a sick child can be a recipe for disaster.

When the father in question is as intriguing, complicated and public a figure as Bryce, and when he tried to outrun his own past with a side order of arrogance and emotional distance, the impact on the healthy children becomes clear.

This book is not an attack. It is an acknowledgement. It asks the questions so many children of troubled parents carry quietly through their lives:

Why were we never enough for you?
Why were you not enough for yourself?
Why did you wreak the havoc you did?

In the end, this book reads as a love letter to a father who could not give what he did not have. It is also an acknowledgement of a mother who carried her own guilt and shared the journey as co author of some of the chaos.

It is also a powerful statement of self recognition from the author. A moment of saying: I am enough. I am proud of who I am. And I will not repeat the same mistakes or chase the same validation.

I hope the peace, comfort and validation in these pages jumps straight into the author, his sibling and Celeste, and begins to heal the parts of them that were never seen or held.
And I hope the same for every reader and listener who recognises pieces of their own families and stories here.

May it land softly, bring clarity and remind them that they were always enough.

A heartfelt, brave and beautifully human story.

Oh to be accepted and seen!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.