Wishing My Father Well: A Memoir of Fathers, Sons and Fly-Fishing

This book was engaging & moving. I would not have read it save for the recommendation of a friend. You may be suprised at this delightful piece of work. I am very sorry to hear that Mr. Plummer and his adult son both died recently.

This is a lovely and very personal book. Bill Plummer writes with a passion and humor that is rarely found. His work serves at times as a painful mirror for his life while anticipating hope for the future.About a year after this book reached the shelves, Bill's son Nicky died in his sleep. During May of this year (2001) Bill himself was struck by a severe heart attack that killed him.The three men of "Wishing My Father Well" are with us now only on these pages. There is a great deal of life in this book. There is a great deal of Bill Plummer in these pages. Despite the losses that have occured, the book is warm, engaging, and humerous. I recommend that you invite Bill into your world through this work.I miss Bill very much.

William Plummer's WISHING MY FATHER WELL hooked me immediately not because I fly fish (I don't) but because of what I might learn about searching for the truth about one's father. I was not disappointed. With a bent for heartfelt nuance, Plummer crisply leads the reader to a convincing, satisfying revelation in the book's finale, which in turn conveys good counsel for sons and fathers alike. An honest and wise book.

"Wishing My Father Well" is a brave, lucid, taut and tender book. In it, William Plummer provides a moving and efficient lesson about how much life and drama lie beneath unexamined surfaces, of a father's fishing diary or of a stream. With a gentle, lyric and occasionally comic touch, he exposes his sometimes harsh, often poignant personal struggle - as father, son and fisherman- to overcome misguided impulses, heart-rending fumblings, isolation and depression. As with all well-told love stories, the reader will ache over Plummer's mistakes and suffer the suspense of his tale's outcome because its handsomely-braided strands (Will he learn to read a stream? To treat his son as a child? To comprehend his father's retreat from the world of go-getters and learn to appreciate his passion for fishing nymphs?) reflect upon each other even as they bear witness to fundamental human experiences that are puzzles to us all. I am grateful for the personal risk Plummer took in writing a book of such compressed beauty and for his intelligent introduction to the mystique of fly-fishing, for which I wish him well.

This short book draws you in to the world of a man wounded by the end of his marriage and the subsequent death of his father. Plummer recovers his father in the South Branch of the Raritan River where he learns to fish using tips from his father's diaries. He makes you laugh at his mishaps and cheer him on as he learns not only about fishing and his father, but about himself. His troubles with fathering his own son make you weep. Anyone who has been through a divorce or has struggled with their children's adolescence can identify with Plummer as he reaches out to his son who is lost between Plummer's dictatorial ways and his mother's abandonment (she's too wrapped up in her relationship with her second husband to see what's happening). These are real people and even if you don't care about fly fishing you will care about them... and you may learn to care about the trout as well.