Songs of My Father and Other Essays, by Gardner Landry

What do mayonnaise, Tab, iced tea, Vicodin, and French banana (or is it French vanilla?) ice cream have in common? If you guessed addictive tendencies and over-the-top histrionic narcissism, you win!

Welcome to the world of Fred, who is certain an ever-adoring public awaits his next spellbinding performance. Imagine a combination of Willard Scott, Ron Burgundy, and Tolkien’s Gollum, but from Louisiana. Just don’t look too carefully for the person behind the performer – you might not find the laff-a-minute laff riot the often comic, sometimes melodramatic, and frequently 1950s-radio-announcer-intense masks conceal.

Songs of My Father and Other Essays by Gardner Landry assembles relics of his writing from an earlier era that hearken to even earlier times, stretching from childhood into his adult years. The Fred essays recount some of his father’s choice exploits, while the second group includes anecdotes and observations from beyond the confines of his family. Additionally, Landry creates a triple-decker club sandwich of a book (with mayonnaise, of course) by including contemporarily written forewords to the first and second sections, along with a present-day afterword to wrap up the collection. It’s not a big book, but it packs a punch and entertains from cover to cover.

“Landry shows us that wit is a more potent therapeutic agent than self-pity…He has such a talent for comic elaboration — long, glittering, serpentine passages that recall S. J. Perelman.” – Emily Fox Gordon, author of Mockingbird Years: A Life In and Out of Therapy, winner of two Pushcart Prizes and recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in the humanities