The Plastic Bag Will Not Inflate

About the Book

When Keith McWalter’s daughter turned sixteen, he decided, after years of separation as her “non-custodial” father, that it was time she knew a little something about him. The Plastic Bag Will Not Inflate: Letters from a Bicoastal Father is a collection of essay-letters and fiction excerpts written over the years of a daughter’s college career and maturation into womanhood, and a father’s evolution from occasional bicoastal visitor to real-life dad. At once a series of wry and often humorous cross-generational messages on education, travel, sex, religion, careers, and urban life as we live it today, it is also an unflinching, multi-faceted look at the facts, foibles and feelings that accompanied one man’s experience of bicoastal parenting in a world of broken families, email, and the inevitable, unavoidable redeye to New York.

If the rage of fathers separated from their children is one of the defining realities of our age, this little book is a call across the gulfs that all fractured families endure, and an invitation to kinship among dispossessed parents on every coast.

Keith G. McWalter is a writer, lawyer and investment banker. His personal essays have been published repeatedly in the long-running “About Men” feature in The New York Times Magazine, and his work has also been included in anthologies and published by the San Jose Mercury News. He and his daughter Jessica, to whom this first collection of his writing is dedicated, both live and work in San Francisco.

About the Author

Keith G. McWalter is a writer, lawyer and investment banker who lives in San Francisco. His essays have been anthologized and regularly published in The New York Times and the San Jose Mercury News.