The Film Club: A True Story of Father and Son.

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

Memoirs, by definition, are personal, but this unusual and moving “true story of a father and son” is deeply personal in a raw, almost uncomfortably intimate way. David Gilmour, journalist, sometime television commentator, and Governor General Award–winning novelist, is the father; his only son, 16, lives with the author’s ex-wife, but, utterly uninterested in school, does no work and skips classes. “School … was making him a liar and a slippery customer.”

Gilmour permits his son to drop out, and, since there is no point “in substituting one activity he loathes for another,” he will not be required to work. He can live with his father on two conditions: “Any drugs and the deal’s off.” (This does not quite work out.) And: “I want you to watch three movies a week with me. I pick them. It’s the only education you’re going to get.” This book chronicles the lives of father and son during the next three years.

Film, of course, features prominently; the book’s index consists only of 119 movie titles. But there is so much more. One wonders how many fathers and sons so frankly discuss their love affairs and sex lives. Gilmour sees his son through the excruciating pain caused by a lover’s sudden rejection, an agony that is ramped up when the young woman becomes the lover of a good friend. What advice can a father give? How much of his own past relationships can a father share with a son? Can movies offer consolation? Understanding? Even wisdom?

One reads this memoir the first time to see how the three years end. One reads it a second time to savour and ponder some moving moments between an aimless teen and a concerned dad who is painfully aware that the path he is letting his son take could lead, easily, to tragedy.