SOURCE: “Germaine Greer as Dogged Daughter,” in Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 8, 1990, p. 8.

In the following review, Mairs offers unfavorable assessment of Daddy, We Hardly Knew You.

“The Quest,” Germaine Greer titles the opening chapter of Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, a memoir of her search for her father's past begun after his death in 1983, as if to lift her pursuit to mythic heights. But the premise of the heroic quest is that its object possesses unique, often mysterious, even sacred, value, capable of transforming at least the searcher and generally the wider world as well. In these terms, Greer's is an anti-quest: “a classic example of herstory [sic], puncturing the ideology” of the hero.

Although she knew her father for more than 40 years. Greer learned almost nothing about his background, and what little information he released, she discovers, was fabricated. Reticence this absolute seems all but...