This time of year I always want to get my dad a gift. He’s been dead seven years and anything I send is unlikely to reach him, but the feeling has stayed. It’s a close cousin to the feeling I had shortly after his death: that he needed my help somehow, that there was something I was supposed to do.
Last year I bought Horrorstör — symbolically for him, inevitably for myself. It’s a horror novel about mass-produced furniture, and it’s designed to look like an IKEA catalogue, of course. My dad wouldn’t have been interested in the story, but he would have loved the book as an object. He had a love-hate relationship with IKEA, from the blandness to the modularity to the bare-bones instruction manuals, that I’ve inherited.
Anyway, the truth is I try to give him things year-round. I have a playlist that I add to all the time (more Billie Eilish than you’d think). I know his taste exactly — a Roger Corman movie set, a palette I can shift into with a blink. It feels like a waste.