Looking for Andy Griffith

April 1, 2024
A nonfiction writer interweaves stories of painful fatherhood experiences with reflections on the TV star who became his personal symbol of the ideal father. Smith grew up worshipping the Andy Griffith Show and the gentle, small-town world of Mayberry it depicted. The biggest draw was Andy Griffith himself, the beloved North Carolina-born actor who was also a distant family relation. Radiating wholesomeness, humor, and fatherly warmth, Griffith made the author forget the tragedies that dogged his own family, including his father's violent accidental death and his mother's subsequent spiral into pill-ridden depression. Smith enthusiastically shared the show with his own children years later, never realizing that Griffith would "save" him yet again when his marriage ended in divorce. Determined to write his way out of the "mess" his life had become, the author began researching Griffith's career and exploring its relationship not just to notions of fatherhood and masculinity, but also to American culture in general. Born into rural poverty, Griffith transcended his background--and later on, prejudices against Southerners--through a college education and then a series of lucky breaks as a singer and actor that eventually led to a starring role in Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd. But it would be on TV, and only after a spectacular string of screen and stage failures, that Griffith would have his greatest success--of the kind that would not only immortalize him but also lead to the creation of a thriving Mayberry tourist industry in the actor's hometown of Mount Airy. Shot through with admiration and grief for all the father figures Smith ever loved, this unique, at times wistfully lyrical memoir is a moving celebration of fatherhood as well as a warm tribute to the lessons all fathers, real and imagined, have to teach us. A poignantly candid memoir.

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