Jamie Bernstein

If you could send one thought to your father through the ether somehow, what would it be?

I would say, "Can you give us something to help us get through what we're going through now?" If my father were alive today he would be apoplectic with what's going on with our government. But, you know, he would be out in the streets. He would be making music to benefit immigrant families. He would be doing everything he could think of, I'm sure. We could use his good works and good energy right about now.

Name one thing about you, and one thing about your father, that you hope readers will take away from the book.

What I hope I conveyed is that everything my father did, in any aspect of his life, was always in the context of love. If he could have, he would have hugged every person on the planet — and he kind of did, through his music. So when I wrote this book, I, too, am hoping that I framed everything I wrote about in the context of love. There are a lot of things about my dad that are complicated and sometimes unsavory. He was a handful, to say the least. But I hope that I presented all of that in the ultimate context of love, because that's certainly how he was.

Jamie Bernstein