When I picked up The Fun Master, I knew I would read a personal narrative about a father losing a son. This is not a spoiler. The extended title, “A Father’s Journey of Love, Loss, and Learning to Live One Day at a Time,” prepares readers for the journey through grief we choose to embark on. The title of the book and the cover—featuring a loaded roller coaster in mid-loop—create a bit of misdirection, or perhaps more accurately: a bit of tragic irony. Seitzer does deliver moments of levity throughout the book that are brief, intense, and as whiplash-inducing as the amusement park ride depicted on the front cover. However, the memoir focuses on the inescapable highs and lows of a family struggling to come to terms with a son’s birth defects and disabilities and a father’s neuropathology and social anxiety.

The Fun Master begins in a moment where the preciousness, fragility, and complicated altruism of fatherhood draws us into a desperate struggle for life. “Tossed in one direction, then another,” writes Seitzer, “I swam toward [Ethan], panicked, my heart racing. Losing sight of him again as another wave crashed into my face, I stopped to cough, only to breathe in more water…. I saw [my son] several feet away from me: terrified and wide-eyed.” The opening chapter of the book ends with Seitzer going under as he tries to push Ethan toward the surface. From this opening peril at Lake Michigan, the book flashes back to Ethan’s birth, then unfolds in a series of chronological vignettes, each chapter illustrating a lesson that Jeff or Ethan—and often both of them—learn. The story proceeds along two parallel courses: a father coming to terms with what it means to parent a child, and that child—Ethan—embracing and engaging a dangerous world with generosity and optimism despite developmental complications and disability.

These narrative arcs create the interplay between father and son. The family’s decision to have Seitzer take on the role of stay-at-home father puts him in a position he feels ill-prepared for. As he explains in the memoir, “at the age of forty-two, without warning, training or experience, [he] was suddenly given command.” Much of the book revolves around Seitzer struggling to navigate the world of parents, primarily stay-at-home moms. His background as a professor of history and a translator of Classical texts, and his neuro-atypicality, complicate his ability to navigate a new milieu. Despite difficulty connecting with other adults, Seitzer maintains a state of enthusiasm around young people and is an excellent playmate for his son and his son’s friends (hence the book’s title). One of the more endearing elements of the book is Seitzer’s capacity to embrace his own childlike self and spend time playing and exploring with Ethan. However, Seitzer, an admitted self-obsessed academic, has difficulty navigating the adult responsibilities of parenting, from learning how to socialize with other parents, to interacting with medical care providers, to restraining himself when Ethan’s friends are cruel. Seitzer wrestles to manage his impulses and let Ethan encounter the world on his own terms.

Seitzer’s self-regulatory struggles are exacerbated by his own medical complications: “a childhood bout with encephalitis left [him] with extreme nervous energy, wild mood swings, and a flash temper” (as he writes in “Scar Tissue” on the Brevity Blog) and he must maintain a rigorous schedule of exercise in order to help regulate his energy levels and combat atrophying effects caused by “the progressive neural decline of Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease,” a congenital disorder he discusses in an interview with Jackie Karnath. The experience with medical struggle and rigorous adherence to routine allow Seitzer to creatively draw on his personal experiences to address his son’s.

Ethan is born without an esophagus and undergoes a number of surgeries to construct a functional digestive system. He spends the first years of his young life enduring routine and painful treatments, and vulnerability to pneumonia, choking and asphyxiation, and infection. Because Ethan spends extensive time on a ventilator as an infant—in addition to his physiological abnormalities—he suffers significant hearing loss. As Seitzer explains in his interview with Kanarth,

Years of experimenting with exercise and treatment options…made me quite adaptable, as well as comfortable with medical procedures and equipment. Besides quickly figuring out how to provide him the care he needed while coping with my own problems, I was able to weave into our day ample opportunities for play and adventure, even amidst considerable medical drama. It turned out that…I was the ideal caregiver for Ethan—a fun-loving kid with major medical issues.

This common ground in living and loving amidst major medical complications sets up the dichotomies in Ethan and Jeff’s evolution as characters in the book. Seitzer points out how Ethan embraces life with enthusiasm and empathy while he percolates with resentment and defensiveness.

Along the way Seitzer unabashedly and courageously reveals and contends with his own weaknesses and frustrations. We get to understand his mind, with all its lingering encephalitic static. The loss of a loved one is never easy--the loss of a child even harder. And the loss of a child who survived infancy despite medical odds to become a thriving young person is unimaginable. Seitzer’s book does what it can to share his son’s life with us in a way that celebrates the memory of Ethan while revealing the reality of a father’s grief.

The memoir reveals in us—and perhaps in Seitzer as well—the truth of an observation he made in his interview with Karnath when discussing children with disabilities: “What’s truly amazing…is they are so joyful amidst all their pain.” Perhaps this is the key to appreciating The Fun Master. To find ourselves, in memoir’s catharsis, savoring moments of joy despite all our pain.