Author of My Father’s Cabin
By Michele Mathews
My Father’s Cabin was first published in 2001 but was republished in May 2025. Mark Phillips shares the story of the relationship he and his father had during the 1960s in the Rust Belt.
What inspired you to write My Father’s Cabin?
MP: When I was publishing memoirs in magazines, mostly about family members, a writer friend asked me whether I knew I was writing a book. I thought the writing of a book-length memoir would be like performing a prolonged striptease—and why would anyone care to see me strip? Yet eventually, his question led me to attempt the book. I began to hope I could write Cabin while keeping on some of my clothing and that the book could be about much more than my life.
Can you tell us a bit about the central themes of the book?
MP: My father had a hobbling concept of masculinity—what he thought a boy and man should be—and I barricaded myself within adolescent solipsism. We sometimes treated each other cruelly without realizing it. In part, Cabin is about how little I understood and appreciated him and about the limited autonomy he granted me despite his love for me.
The relationship between parent and child evolved and became much better, but almost too late, when he was dying. It’s an unfortunate truth that many of us resent or take for granted some of our family until we are losing them. My father was diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer when he was only 40. He agreed to surgical castration in order to prolong his life a few more years. Not because he was afraid to die, but because he was supporting our family financially and needed to work longer before he could collect a small pension. He went on working in tremendous pain. He worked in a coal-fired power plant. Cabin is a story about misunderstanding and hurt, but also sacrifice and reconciliation.
I suspect his cancer was work-related. Industry does violence to workers. I’ve known too many people with work-related diseases and injuries, including asbestosis and loss of fingers and limbs, in addition to the usual back and joint damage. Meanwhile, the smooth-handed, wealthy people in Congress keep talking about raising the retirement age at which workers can collect Social Security benefits. It takes strength to survive industrial employment. And it takes a lot of love to hold a working-class family together.
How did you approach writing about family dynamics in the story?
MP: At first, hesitantly and with some dread. Eventually, eagerly—because I was beginning to understand more about who I was, who my loved ones were, who my friends were. And I realized that even though my family had its particular experiences and relationships, the dynamics were somewhat similar to those in many other families, regardless of social or economic class.
What role does the setting of the cabin play in the narrative, and why did you choose that particular backdrop?
MP: For better or worse, possessing land was long part of the American dream. To a degree, it still is. By the time of my childhood, most workers lived in or near cities. Some desired get-away acreage in the countryside: a small vacation cottage or, in my father’s case, a hunting cabin. My mother was not enchanted by the cabin. To her, the cabin meant she would need to go on cooking and cleaning while my father was building his cabin or was hunting and fishing.
But the cabin is where he and I became close. Away from the dirty, dim, deafening and sweltering power plant. Several years after his death, I married. Margaret and I moved into the cabin and lived off-grid and without indoor plumbing. Eventually, it was modernized and expanded into a house. We raised our children there. Margaret died two years ago, but I still live in what was my father’s cabin, haunted by good and bad ghosts. In a way, I’ve formed friendships with the bad. I can’t easily imagine living anywhere else. Most of this is in the book, toward the end.
Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing this story, or was it more about telling a personal narrative?
MP: I didn’t have a specific audience in mind. Memoirs are, of course, personal narratives, or usually are, but I hoped the story I was telling would resonate with other people who have a working-class background, although not solely them. Family struggles, selfishness, alienation, sacrifice, love, reconciliation—more than a single class of people experience these.
What role does nostalgia play in the story, and how did you capture that feeling in the writing?
MP: Not much. I know people who wish they could be 16 or whatever again, but I’m not such a person. I didn’t have a terrible childhood, but I was even more ignorant than I am now. I do miss the people I wrote about, and I did find that when I gave myself to the story they felt alive again to me. When I was done with the writing, I mourned because they were again going away. Nostalgia can be a sentimental balm, a beckoning of friendly ghosts, and an abolishment of time—and there is nothing wrong with any of that. But for some people, it becomes self-delusion, a sentimental fantasy about the past and present. I kept nostalgia at a distance.
In what ways do you think My Father’s Cabin reflects broader societal themes or issues?
MP: I answered this in part when I got carried away in response to your question about my central themes.
Cabin might also help someone to understand part of why so many working-class citizens feel betrayed by the Democratic Party and voted for a presidential candidate who was born into wealth and shares few of their personal values. And why some in the working-class revel in the current destruction of what they consider to be—in certain cases, correctly—institutions and agencies designed to benefit elites. These voters are angry. Some take the attitude, “What more do we have to lose?”
The working-class lifestyle described in my book is rapidly vanishing. In fact, it was disappearing in my father’s time; the term “rust belt” was already in common use. Blue collar work is difficult and dangerous, but most of the workers take quiet pride in what they do. The mill or plant or factory can seem like an overbearing and occasionally abusive member of the family, but family all the same. The separation isn’t going well. Pensions? Gone. Dream home? Gone. Working in a plant where a grandparent did and a grown child could be employed? Gone. Job security? Gone. To imagine working-class anger, one first needs to seriously acknowledge—to feel—what has been lost.
Maybe lost is the wrong word. A guy in a working-class bar took issue with my use of it: “Lost it, my ass. It got ripped off.”
How did you develop the voice and perspective of the narrator in My Father’s Cabin?
MP: The development was tricky at first. I was writing as an adult who was looking back on much of his childhood. My younger self had a different voice. The voices were in conflict, but made peace by engaging in a sort of shadow conversation with each other.
What role does memory play in the story, and how do you explore the complexity of remembering versus forgetting?
MP: Yes, it’s complex. I wanted to write truthfully, but had to rely on my imperfect memory. One of my siblings was close to my age, but she died before I began writing Cabin. My other sibling was 10 when our father died, and I was beginning college. Our childhoods did not overlap all that much. I checked my memories with my mother as I wrote, and that helped.
After Lyons Press published Cabin in 2001 (it has been reissued by Arcade Publishing, an imprint of SkyHorse Publishing), I gave my mother a copy. When she finished reading, she threw the book against a wall and wept. I said, “Well, that’s quite a criticism.” That wasn’t it, though. The story brought back profoundly good and bad memories, very emotionally for her. I asked whether I had been accurate. She said yes, although I suppose she might have said it out of parental kindness. My uncle Fred called me up after the book was published and told me he had liked it. Then he gave me a backhanded compliment. “I didn’t think you had it in you.” Now there’s a working-class uncle for you.
A short aside. My wife wouldn’t read Cabin in manuscript form after I told her she was in it. When I asked why, she flipped the question. “Why do I need to be in your book?” I answered, “Well, Margaret—sex sells.” Actually, there is no sex in the book. Later, I said, “You’re in it because you saved my life.”
Were there any surprising twists or moments during the writing process that you didn’t anticipate when you first started the book?
MP: I knew I would be writing about incidents that would probably be painful to recall, but was surprised to find that I felt distant as I wrote, as if writing about people other than my family. When I finished, I was filled with emotion, but not until then.
How do you balance personal experiences with fictional elements in your writing?
MP: I partially answered this question when I got off-track in reply to the one about memory and forgetting. I should have added that all memoirs have omissions because of forgetting, but also because narratives are not minute-by-minute or even month-by-month accounts of lives. Actual life is plotless. We construct plots in retrospect. If I may paraphrase Joan Didion, we tell ourselves stories in order to make sense of our lives. Although most people wish to be truthful, I suspect that the stories we sincerely believe to be true about ourselves are fiction as often as they are not. Still, I wanted and tried to be truthful: honest with myself and the reader.
There are overtly fictional elements in Cabin, nonetheless. Between each main chapter, short italicized interludes tell a story about the land on which the cabin was built. I researched the history of the land, but I imagined incidents to give flesh to the history. The italicized sections are obviously fictional. I included them because the land itself is a character in the book. The final italicized section is about my father and is based on an object I found in my pond after his death. I won’t say more about the object because I don’t want to give away the ending. That section is italicized because it’s a product of speculation and imagination. I like to think of it as a creation of the land.
What was the most challenging part of writing My Father’s Cabin?
MP: There were two. One was to keep in mind Virginia Woolf’s struggle to kill “the angel in the house.” That’s not easy when writing about loved ones. Joyce Carol Oates, who grew up in a working-class family, gave an endorsement to Cabin; she called it a “relentlessly honest, unsentimental and unsparing account of working-class life.” I like to think her endorsement means that I banished my angel while writing.
The other challenge was in deciding what to leave out of the story. For example, my hometown—which, by the way, is now mostly an upscale community, no longer a working-class bedroom community—was the hometown of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. That’s interesting, but I never met him and he didn’t belong in the story I was telling.
Another example, I donated a kidney to my sister Kim. She developed an infection after the transplant and died without ever leaving the hospital with her new kidney. That story is an important part of my life, but is given only a single sentence in my book. It just wasn’t part of the narrative thread I was unraveling.
How do you think My Father’s Cabin will resonate with readers who may not have experienced similar family dynamics?
MP: That depends on how open and curious the reader is and how well the writing succeeds. Writing can grant wide resonance to a story regardless of its specific characters. I’ve read many good memoirs and novels about people or characters whose lives have been very different from mine, and yet those books have welcomed me. It usually doesn’t hurt to meet new people.
Are there any upcoming projects you’re working on, and can you share any details about them?
MP: I’m finishing work on a novel about the civilian life of an American who participated in the Mai Lai massacre. Given the current market for mid-list literary fiction, I doubt it will ever be published. Another book might be emerging from my most recent essays. One of my essays will be published in the summer issue of The American Scholar. It’s about the duality of nature, a subject I think about whenever I become lost in a forest, which happens far too often and suggests that I’m a ninny.
Another will be published in the autumn Notre Dame Magazine; it’s about the blessings and hazards of nostalgia. Aspects of these essays should help me to write about trees, as odd as that might seem. I’m kicking around the idea of beginning a short book with the working title A Life in Trees. When I was young, New York Times Magazine published a short essay of mine about my planting of seven thousand or so trees on my land.
Since then, a lot has happened in my life and in the life of those trees and the larger natural world. This spring, my son planted more trees here. Trees have always been central when I try to make some sense of life. They teach me how brief human life is and remind me of the fragility and dearness of all life, and yet they give me a form of hope that feels realistic. The meaning of life is life. That’s the sketchy, cliched, nascent idea. What’s the plot? No idea. Where the story might actually lead and how, I can’t guess yet. Writing is discovery—where the wandering ends.
As I said, I get lost a lot.
My Father’s Cabin
Mark Phillips
In the Rust Belt of the 1960s, a blue-collar father works double shifts, chasing elusive dreams: a good night’s sleep, eternal life, a cabin in the Allegheny Mountains where he can hunt and fish. His son is a child of the times, chasing his own dreams: girls, long hair, politics, and independence. And both chase the same dream: each other’s elusive love. This is a familiar story uniquely told, in a voice that perfectly captures America at its most turbulent, an era that continues to define the largest generation in American history. My Father’s Cabin chronicles life in America as the Greatest Generation gives way to the Me Decade, as responsibility gives way to self-fulfillment-and then back again, as responsibility becomes self-fulfillment.
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Article originally Published in the Summer 2025 Issue.