Sh*t My Dad Says

Photographs from Sh*t My Dad Says
(Click on Thumbnails to Enlarge)

I have no idea why I'm sopping wet in this photo, but I'm going to guess it's because I rolled in something filthy or spilled something on myself. Hosing me down was my dad’s favorite method for cleaning me off.	Here I am with my dad in his garden, which he adores and whose upkeep he takes very seriously. "It's my first love, besides your mother and horse racing. And you and your brothers, too, I suppose," he’s said.	My dad used to carry me on his shoulders quite a bit when I was a child--until the time I accidentally urinated on him while I was up there. We were at a neighbor’s house and he quickly ran outside, threw me off, ripped off his shirt, then hosed me down like he was from the CDC and I'd come in contact with the Ebola Virus.

My dad is an avid reader, and all throughout my childhood he’d come home after working for 12 hours and we’d sit on the couch and read together.	My family’s trip to the Grand Canyon in 1983 was one of only two family vacations we took. It coincided with the time when my dad started to lose his hair, and decided he'd wear hats to mask his increasing baldness. It wasn’t long before he changed his tune, tossed the caps, and decided he didn’t care what anyone else thought.

After being dumped by his longtime girlfriend, twenty-eight-year-old Justin Halpern found himself living at home with his seventy-three-year-old dad. Sam Halpern, who is "like Socrates, but angrier, and with worse hair," has never minced words, and when Justin moved back home, he began to record all the ridiculous things his dad said to him:

"That woman was sexy. . . . Out of your league? Son, let women figure out why they won't screw you. Don't do it for them."

"Do people your age know how to comb their hair? It looks like two squirrels crawled on their heads and started fucking."

"The worst thing you can be is a liar. . . . Okay, fine, yes, the worst thing you can be is a Nazi, but then number two is liar. Nazi one, liar two."

More than a million people now follow Mr. Halpern's philosophical musings on Twitter, and in this book, his son weaves a brilliantly funny, touching coming-of-age memoir around the best of his quotes. An all-American story that unfolds on the Little League field, in Denny's, during excruciating family road trips, and, most frequently, in the Halperns' kitchen over bowls of Grape-Nuts, Sh*t My Dad Says is a chaotic, hilarious, true portrait of a father-son relationship from a major new comic voice.