My father, my father, my father
New fiction from Issue Sixteen
“Good Health,” Mimi Diamond’s Issue Sixteen short story, begins with a young woman checking her father into a rehabilitation facility in London — “an old Georgian townhouse that felt more like a hotel.” The hospital staff initially think the narrator is the patient, before her father sets them right (“She’s got this thing under the eyes. Hyperpigmentation, was it?”). As the rest of the story explores, however, distinguishing herself from her father proves to be a more vexed task than the narrator may have initially understood. Read Diamond’s razor-sharp story online today, and be sure to subscribe to receive the full issue when it arrives.
MIMI DIAMOND
At parties I’d try to remember that I should keep something of myself back, that perhaps I could draw an audience without brandishing the ugly figure of my father. But it took only about half a glass of wine for me to feel his sentences clicking along the backs of my teeth like a lozenge, or a pip I was desperate to shoot out.