There are two stories contained within "A Conversation with My Father." One story is about a visit between a middle-aged woman and her sick, elderly father. Together, they discuss fiction and the daughter's attitude toward tragedy in literature and, by implication, in life. The second story is the narrative the daughter tells her father. This story is about a mother who, to be close to her drug-addicted son, becomes a drug-addict herself, only to be abandoned by the son when he overcomes the habit.
"A Conversation with My Father" is a metafictional story; that is, a fiction about fiction. The inclusion of a story within a story, the descriptions of the narrator writing that story, and the narrator and her father's conversation about fiction are all elements of metafiction. Metafictional stones prompt the reader.....
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