PVD Author Lucas Mann Gets Real on Fatherhood in Latest Work
'Attachments' is a must read for any anxious dad doing their best this Father's Day.
Courtesy of Lucas Mann/Portrait by Rebecca Atwood.
When it comes to taking on the role of a present, hands-on dad, Providence author and Riffraff co-owner Lucas Mann knows the score.
“There is an incredibly low bar,” he says. “You can be seen with an enormous amount of generosity, much of which isn’t really earned. You feel incredibly visible and like everyone’s rooting for you. I’ve never had people be nicer to me. It’s that weird tension where I’m not doing it for that, but also: That’s nice.”
Courtesy of Lucas Mann
In his new collection of essays, Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances, Mann examines the multifaceted experience of fatherhood as one of constant performance as he articulates the anxieties, paradoxes and little victories of millennial fatherhood.
The book begins with a more abstract mode of performance as Mann imagines a series of brief, hopeful futures and existentially alarming what-ifs for a daughter born into our current climate
catastrophe. Others explore literal performances of fatherhood, as with the “Dads Being Dudes Making Jokes” about finding kernels of truth within dad memes and the real dads who make them.
His personal experiences in parenting are woven honestly and hilariously through ruminations on the broader ideas of fatherhood and popular culture, including contemplating LeBron James’ “girl dad” side, and how Brad Pitt’s constant on-screen chowing down brings up the body issues Mann hopes won’t be passed on to his daughter. Mann also crafts a superficially heartfelt view of fatherhood from the borrowed words of famous real and fictional girl dads who range from being complicated personalities to morally dubious to outright villains.
The moments of big love that you would expect are peppered throughout — his love for his daughter radiates through it all — as are moments of humor and frustration. Mann is game to call himself out and admit when he’d really just rather be scrolling through LeBron’s Instagram, but what parent can’t relate to that?
In the end, readers will find notes of a dad they recognize from their own social circle, if not their own mirror. I certainly found echoes of my own parenting struggles perfectly summed up in such a gut-punch of a sentence that I had to walk away from the book for a bit: “The flip side of not wanting fatherhood to be a joke is having no sense of humor about it at all.”
Accurate, beautiful, brutal. A must-read for any anxious dad doing their best this Father’s Day.
