Throughout the book, we sense the immense feeling of guilt Lionel Dahmer feels that he somehow through his own genes and faulty parenting contributed to what his son became, and through this alone are given a glimpse into the suffering the Dahmer family went through. Rather than having developed a natural fatherhood, I had learned, as if by rote, what a father should do. When, at six, Jeff broke several windows out in an old, abandoned building, was that only a typical boyhood prank, or was it the early signal of a dark and impulsive destructiveness? Jeffrey Dahmer was someone else, the formal public name for a man who was, at least to me, still Jeff, still my son.

He was sued by two victims' families for using their names in the book without obtaining prior consent.The father describes Jeffrey as feeling lonely and that's why he would murder people and then want to be close to them because he felt like if he didn't that they would leave him. Overall, this book was surprisingly well written and brutally honest in the places where it had to be. He can speculate; he can point a finger at this situation or that situation; he can look inward and berate himself for all his failings as a parent. Everything that Lionel ignored, now comes back to haunt him and he's like, "Oh, so that's what it meant.

I have read a lot if literature pertaining to Jeff's crimes , people who think they could explain it based on psychiatric judgements etc so it's refreshing to reading an account from a entirely personal view, not a doctors or a someone who poured over hours of transcripts but from his actual father. In this deeply personal account, Lionel reflects on his son's troubled childhood and the shocking crimes he committed. The book is simply, as the title states, a father's story, sort of Dahmer's way of working through and trying to understand how his son could possibly be capable of the horrible acts he committed.I wanted to take him back to that early boyhood time, to freeze him there, so that he could never reach beyond the innocence and harmlessness of his childhood, never reach any of the people whose lives he had destroyed . However, as Dahmer repeatedly states, he has "an analytical mind" so the work tends to toward calculated prose, that gives very little emotional insight into what his experience was like, so that the book boils down to little more than a litany of events from Jeffrey Dahmer's childhood and trial, making it difficult to empathize with him or his wife.

REVIEW IS LONG AND INTENDED ONLY FOR THOSE WHO ARE DEEPLY INTERESTED IN READING THE BOOK, NOT FOR CASUALTIES.I would start some task, working slowly through it, as I always did, and suddenly my mother would appear, and in a few quick strokes, either of mind or hand, she would finish it for me. A final chapter, added after Jeffrey's death in prison, simply adds a film of utter loathing to the reading experience, as father somehow contrives to tie in a possible redemption for his son with an incoherent, self-serving diatribe about the righteousness of intelligent design. Maybe it's because secretly I am a sicko who wants to know more about the minds of serial killers and their families. Lionel Dahmer bravely confesses his own early experiments with perversity, a long stint as a pyromaniac culminating in almost burning down a neighbors garage, attempting to hypnotize a girl when he was thirteen in the hopes of "having [his] way with her" and his own dissociative personality that was a lesser version of what developed in his son. Dahmer goes on to recite his son's litany of failure: dropping out of college after only one semester; being kicked out of the army for his alcoholism; his interest in devil worship and seances.