"After Visiting Friends" is a heartrending and beautifully written memoir of a family's legacy of secrets. It is a universal story about how we discover ourselves.
Michael Hainey had just turned six, in the spring of 1970, when his uncle knocked on his family's back door early one morning with tragic news: his father, Bob Hainey, had been found dead in the night, alone on a Chicago street. Thirty-five years old, Bob was a bright and shining star in the hard-living brotherhood of 1960s American newspapers, one that involved booze-soaked nights that bled into dawn. And then suddenly he was gone, leaving behind a young widow, two sons, a fractured family—and questions surrounding the mysterious nature of his death that would obsess Michael throughout adolescence and long into adulthood.
Finally, roughly his father's age when he died, and a seasoned reporter himself, Michael set out to learn what happened that night.
Died "after visiting friends," the obituaries said. But the details beyond that were inconsistent. What friends? Where? At the heart of his quest is Michael's all-too-silent, opaque mother, a woman of great courage and tenacity—and a steely determination not to look back. Prodding and cajoling his relatives, and working through a network of his father's buddies who abide by an honor code of silence and secrecy, Michael sees beyond the long-held myths and ultimately reconciles the father he'd imagined with the one he comes to know—and in the journey discovers new truths about his mother.
A stirring portrait of a family and its legacy of secrets, After Visiting Friends is the story of a son who goes in search of the truth and finds not only his father, but a rare window into a world of men and newspapers and fierce loyalties that no longer exists.
Photo: Mark Seliger
“Michael Hainey makes his quest for answers about his father read like a thriller. Then, just when he's got you turning pages as fast as you can, he stops with a heartrending detail, or steers you into some drowsy gin mill or fading prairie town for a sidebar of blunt-force power. By the end you're wrung out, but also uplifted.”
“As much an elegy to a once-upon-a-time era in American newspapers as it is a journey back, into a family and its past, to find truth. With poetic grace and taut investigative storytelling, Michael Hainey's After Visiting Friends shows how to keep going we sometimes need to pause and look back at where and who we come from.”
“Is there any more powerful story in the world than a boy looking for his father? Michael Hainey's memoir begins with a mysterious death, proceeds through years of unanswered questions, builds into a relentless investigation, and ends with the stubborn alchemy of a heart transformed. This is a beautiful work of reporting and redemption.”
“With a deft hand and a gentle touch, memoir becomes mystery in a world that brings back a bygone era of newspapermen. Hainey ultimately takes us through a deeply poignant journey of self-discovery—about how hard it is to sort out who we are and why we are and how our searches can lead to the most unexpected, but most satisfying, discoveries.”
