PositiveThe New York TimesDaddy Issues, Katherine Angel’s third collection of essays, presents the sexual nature of a daddy-daughter dynamic so matter-of-factly that at first I couldn’t help seeing it as a self-help manual: the dummy’s guide that I had long been waiting for...Instead, this is an examination of our often prurient fascination with the dynamic, and that fascination’s inherent misogyny. It’s also something of a reclamation...\'You can, at least in principle, leave a husband, but you can’t leave a father,\' Angel says...Unless, she suggests, you write about him...Her thought-provoking approach is to argue that our society has overlooked the place of daddies in \'daddy issues\'...To prove the point, she dexterously analyzes a variety of literary works, historical figures like Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, and contemporary tabloid examples, like Meghan Markle and Ivanka Trump...But we women do have to look at men, and we must endure our excited terror when they look at us...It is impossible to rid ourselves of our fathers, and they are, inevitably, forever stamped to our insides...The title of Angel’s book gestures not only at our dismissive cultural shorthand, but at its universality...Is an \'issue\' inherently bad?...Comparing my own father to Winston Churchill felt good, if only in the moment.
