Furthering my education

the long version

On a Thursday morning in 1965, Dr. William Corbett tacked a note to his office door: "I have gone to further my education." Neither his patients nor his family ever saw him again. Cut off from all contact with his father, his son is forced to piece together a composite sketch of his absent parent's life. Over the years he traces his father's peripatetic movement across the globe; what he cannot do is locate him in any geography of the heart. For over thirty years, themes of transience and loss have occupied poet and essayist William Corbett. Nowhere in his work do they find fuller, more direct expression than they do here. In Furthering My Education, William Corbett has written a compelling memoir of his painful relationship with his father, a man who sought to control his family and his fate through fortune hunting, artifice and intimidation. This powerful memoir of an American family goes to the heart of parent-child relationships and the bankruptcy of trust.