Rudi Herrmann took a deep breath and asked his son Peter to sit down. “I have a story to tell you,” he said. Rudi had been preparing for this conversation for several years, running over the words in his mind. He was about to tell his 16-year-old son that everything Peter thought he knew about their family was a lie.
The pair sat on a bench, and Peter waited quietly for whatever it was his father wanted to say. He was an academically gifted and unfailingly polite child, but he had been struggling psychologically. He had few friends and felt overwhelmed at home. Rudi, an ambitious German-Canadian film-maker, was charming with colleagues and friends, but with his son he was something of a tyrant: not violent, but psychologically domineering. He was disdainful of American pop culture, insisting that Peter not waste his time on mind-rotting pursuits such as reading comics or listening to rock music. It was almost as if he was actively trying to sabotage Peter’s efforts to fit in.
