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Oct. 10, 2025
November 1973: Headshot portrait of American actor Robert De Niro with shaggy hair, smiling. (Photo by Santi Visalli Inc./Getty Images)
There is talk of gangsters and godfathers in this newsletter, so a pic of Robert de Niro from the ‘70s is pretty much obligatory.
Santi Visalli Inc./Archive Photos/Getty Images
Today, we have yet another guest — and another book recommendation, this time for the adults. Jason Diamond, the accomplished writer for the likes of Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and a laundry list of big name publications (not to mention his great newsletter, The Melt ([link removed]) ) very recently became both a novelist and, according to him, more importantly, a dad. His debut novel, Kaplan’s Plot, appropriately explores known and unknown family history, the ties that bind, and absentee fathers.
Kaplan’s Plot is a page-turner with vivid history, action, and gangsters (the literary man’s trifecta!). But it’s also a meditation on family. It personally left me curious about the hidden stories within my family and what part I play in it. I’ve long had something that amounts to a fear of digging too deep into my family lore. The stories I was told as a kid, the opinions and tales that were carefully and repeatedly handed down, always felt so thin and fragile. I worried that too many questions could expose half-truths or, worse, bring up skeletons that paint an entirely different reality. My Scotch-Irish side — the ones who came to America most recently — were full of superstitions and a dark humor that had a way of silencing pragmatic questions. (Standing in a decaying cemetery with my uncle, imagining the sooty industry of early 20th century Motherwell, Scotland gave me a sense of what was being silenced — and why). My other side was too full of hidden histories, covered by embelished
character traits and tales of victory (the wine cellar found after the Battle of the Bulge, the larger-than-life painting of a perfectly dressed little boy in the 19th century) rather than of hardship or defeat (the near-fatal sniper’s bullet, a body altered by Polio).
Kaplan’s Plot deftly explores such pasts, but it’s when it brings it to the present that is so impactful. Elijah is the aimless main character who, having left Silicon Valley in scandal and failure, finds himself back at home in Chicago taking care of his mom and digging into the family history. He’s a lost soul, one who is not exactly lovable, but is immensely relatable. It’s this character, a grown child really, who turned my thoughts to my own children. What stories and traits will my kid take in and pass on, and on, and on, long after I’m gone?
Elijah finds a very physical answer in a burial plot built by his grandfather. The rest of us may seek more symbolic resolutions.
I could go on. Clearly the book is a worthwhile read, one that can helps us all to dwell on this most essential part of our task as a parent. But don’t take it from me. Here’s the author himself, writing about dads in the book, his tenuous relationship with male role models, and becoming one himself. Read on — and then do pick up a copy.
Tyghe Trimble,
Fatherly
** “The truth is that I wasn’t a fan of dads...”
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Somebody recently asked me what I had against fathers. They asked it with a joking tone in their voice, but they did it in front of about 75 other people, and I wasn’t quite prepared for that question. I’ve been touring my debut novel, Kaplan’s Plot, over the last month, and generally the questions tend to stick to asking me about my influences or whether or not any of the stuff that I wrote about in a book I’ve tried to describe as “The Godfather 2…but Jewish and the grandfather is a gangster, but the grandson is a failed tech guy in his mid-30s who moves back home to take care of his dying mother and knows absolutely nothing about her or his gangster grandfather” was autobiographical. But the father thing felt out of left field until I had a second to think about it.
The truth is that I wasn’t a fan of dads until I was going to become one myself. The only positive male role models I had growing up were my two grandfathers who both died in my early-teens, and almost all the other guys in my life couldn’t take care of themselves, let alone a weird, highly sensitive kid with ADHD and an overactive imagination. The person at the event had asked their question because they were curious why I decided to create a character whose father had died when he was younger, and whether it had anything to do with my own fractured relationship with my dad that I’ve written about before. I think the answer I gave was satisfactory, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the question for days.
I started working on Kaplan’s Plot a little before my wife got pregnant with our first child. When she told me we were having a baby, I’d nearly completed the first draft, and while the idea was basically the same, one of the key characters missing when I wrote the second draft was the father of Elijah, my main character in the modern part of the book. In the first draft, Elijah’s dad was alive, present, and the more nurturing of the two parents, but in the second draft, he’s dead.
Elijah’s mother, Eve, was always a bigger part of the story, but she’s more distant and reserved. I liked having the balance of the two parents with different approaches, but then, a few weeks after my wife and I started telling people we were having a kid, somebody said something that I had obviously heard before, but never in the context of actually becoming a father myself: dads being stable, positive role models for their children is vital. I know that sounds silly and incredibly obvious but growing up and taking years to figure out how to thrive and be happy when you don’t have that stable parental relationship can sometimes make you feel like all that happiness is a way to spite your parents. I’m sad I spent so much time and energy feeling that but coming to grips with the idea that soon I was going to have to be a positive role model in my child’s life really hit that home.
There’s no comparison when it comes to raising my daughter and putting out my book. I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished as a writer, but being a dad is the first thing in my life I’ve ever done that I believe I’m truly good at. I’ll make plenty of mistakes along the way, but I’ll always keep trying, and I’ll always be there for my daughter, just like I believe Elijah’s own dad was in Kaplan’s Plot. So by basically killing the dad off when I found out I was going to become a father, I was basically trying to get deeper into my understanding of how important a role a father plays in a kid’s life. Obviously, it’s both parents that need to give it their all when raising children, but I think since no two parents are alike, then they both bring different things to the table. It sounds morbid, but I basically sacrificed Elijah’s dad because I thought it made the book better, but it also helped me think deeper about the impact I wanted to have on my child.
One of the other things I tell people about Kaplan’s Plot is that it’s not horror, but the novel is full of ghosts. You don’t hear from the ghosts, and I wouldn’t say there’s any supernatural elements in the story, but there is a haunted feeling since it’s a book that deals with multiple generations of a family. Elijah’s dead father was the rock that Elijah’s grandfather never was. He was a kind and decent man, and as I have settled into middle age, I’ve done a lot of thinking about how, when my time on this earth is over, I’d love it if people could say the same thing about me. I aim to be kind and decent, a hard worker, a good friend, and a great husband and father. Will I achieve that goal? Unfortunately, I’ll be dead so I won’t be able to hear what people have to say about me, but in the meantime, I can at least play a little wish fulfillment with a fiction character whose presence is definitely in the book whether he has a lot of scenes or not.
-Jason Diamond, author of Kaplan’s Plot
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Amazon
Kaplan's Plot ([link removed])
$30
Get It Now ([link removed])
FURTHER READING
What it Was Like Having An Ex-Mobster For a Father ([link removed])
"I Yelled Too Much": 15 Dads On Their Biggest Parenting Regrets ([link removed])
My Father Never Met His Granddaughter, But She'll Know His Stories ([link removed])
How Incarceration Is Passed Down From Father To Son ([link removed])
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