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This reflective memoir examines an odd and estranged father through the lens of his scientific expertise.

Carole Firstman’s ruminative memoir tracks a strained relationship with her eccentric but gifted father. The ambitious title, Origins of the Universe and What It All Means, is entirely appropriate: it is a direct and repeated quotation from her father, a research biologist obsessed with finding meaning in an enormous and confounding world.

Firstman suspects her father is on the autism spectrum, which might explain some of the social awkwardness, emotional detachment and unrepentant self-centeredness that characterizes Bruce and his parenting strategies–like moving his 19-year-old bride and their newborn daughter, Carole, into a tent in the backyard, because the baby’s crying disturbed his work. Despite such shocking details, Firstman gives a nuanced portrayal of an intelligent, lonely man capable of rare displays of concern. Weaving evolutionary theory, hard science and metaphysical origin stories with personal memoir, Firstman takes a contemplative tone. She is concerned with questions of linked causality (think the butterfly effect–except with scorpions, Bruce’s area of specialty) and what exactly she may have inherited from him. For example, she puts the same obsessive language in her own mouth that she does in Bruce’s, hinting that the Asperger-like symptoms she ascribes to him may tease at her, too. Firstman’s mother appears almost parenthetically, but at its heart this memoir is about what is inherited from and owed to one’s parents.

Origins contains unusual elements, including diagrams, mock lesson plans and footnotes, alongside Firstman’s self-questioning narrative. Despite its broad scope, this essentially human story handles “a conundrum of attachment and detachment” with sensitivity and rigor.

This review originally ran in the August 12, 2016 issue of Shelf Awareness for Readers. To subscribe, click here, and you’ll receive two issues per week of book reviews and other bookish news.

Filed under: book reviews | Tagged: family, memoir, Shelf Awareness |