Bill Gaston's relationship with his father was stormy. Sons clash with fathers, particularly with towering, authoritarian figures like Gaston Senior. Fairly or unfairly, sons look for reasons to rebel, particularly against boring suburban fathers who seem to prize conformity above all else and, fairly or unfairly, sons judge their fathers when they can't handle their booze.

But even a father and son as doomed to clash as Gaston and his father could fish together. When they were shoulder-to-shoulder, joined in shared anticipation and common purpose, gazing at the waves of the Pacific Ocean, they were no longer betrayed by their differences. When Gaston's father dies, this is the memory of his father that he keeps alive.

In the years that follow, however, he learns more about his father's relationship with his father. It too was marked by heavy drinking, though it took a much darker turn. What Gaston comes to realize is that the man his younger self had been so eager to judge was in fact capable of near heroic feats of self mastery. As a father of grown sons himself, he acutely feels the wounds he must have inflicted years before by withholding so much he now knows that fathers long for. Returning to the past, Gaston goes back to those times in the boat, and comes to understand his own story anew as he sees his father in a new light.

Warm, often funny and alive to all the ways in which the words for love so often come too late, Just Let Me Look at You captures a father's inexpressible tenderness for a child and the longing he feels when that child becomes a man. (From Hamish Hamilton)

Just Let Me look at You is on the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize shortlist.

"This is an intimate portrait of my father and, more so, it's a portrait of our relationship, which was fraught. It's very much about something that many people will recognize, which is the strange yearning silence between fathers and sons. Not a lot gets said, but there's much emotion in the background.

"This book came about when I came back to the West Coast after 30 years and I was basically given a boat, an old junker, and I started fishing again. Everything was instantly familiar — the look of a salmon, the smell of it. I was thrown back to many long summers spent with my dad fishing... We shared a really strange talent for sitting for eight hours, not saying all that much, but completely passionate about what we were doing. Just sitting there, waiting for a bite. Of course, we're sitting on one of the best places on Earth — out on the water, no human structures to be seen. Sitting there with my dad and being perfectly content, but never saying anything about being completely content and recognizing it only after it's long gone."