July 12, 2026
Daddy issues, but make it literature
Sixteen Failed Attempts to Write a Eulogy for My Father (2024)
Readers were wrecked, riveted, and making breakfast warnings over this brutal family essay
TLDR: A writer’s painful attempt to make sense of an abusive father’s life and lonely death hit readers hard. The comments turned into a swirl of praise, personal confessions, and dark jokes, with many calling it brilliant, brutal, and absolutely impossible to stop reading.
This wasn’t just an essay about a father’s death — it turned into a full-on comment section group therapy session. In “Sixteen Failed Attempts to Write a Eulogy for My Father”, the writer pieces together the wreckage of a deeply painful relationship with an abusive, addicted father who died alone in a hotel room. The writing is raw, unsparing, and deeply human, and the crowd response was immediate: people weren’t just impressed, they were shaken. One of the simplest comments said it all: “Now that’s writing.” Another called it “compulsively readable,” which pretty much became the thread’s unofficial slogan.
But the real drama came from readers seeing their own family disasters reflected back at them. Several commenters started comparing the essay to their own fathers, with one person bluntly admitting that posts like this make them see “the bright sides” of their own upbringing. That is the mood here: admiration mixed with emotional whiplash. Some focused on how brilliantly the piece turns a chaotic childhood into something clear and readable; others got stuck on the grim details, including one unforgettable warning that the essay contains decaying corpse imagery and is “not suitable for breakfast.” Dark? Yes. Funny? Also yes.
There was even a quieter hot take underneath it all: readers were surprised the father got a funeral at all, since people who burn every bridge often don’t. So the verdict from the crowd was messy, sad, and loud: devastating story, incredible writing, and way too real for anyone with family baggage.
Key Points
- •The author describes a compassion meditation that applies the same wishes for safety, health, and self-acceptance to oneself, a loved one, a stranger, and a disliked person.
- •The author says they avoided including their father in this practice for years because their feelings toward him were conflicted and unresolved.
- •The father died alone in a hotel room after repeated evictions, job losses, and estrangement from relatives and others who might have housed him.
- •The author says they stopped seeing their father at age sixteen after a failed intervention, and their brother later limited contact following therapists’ warnings about the effect on his mental health.
- •The excerpt states that the father had white matter disease that can lead to vascular dementia, with many of his health problems attributed to drug use.