Zack Rogow revisits his father’s life in new memoir

Zack Rogow’s revised memoir “Hugging My Father’s Ghost: A Memoir of a Shortened Life” is out Oct. 6, 2026 from Cirque Press. The book uses his late father’s writings and family history to examine grief, legacy and long-buried secrets.

Why it matters: - The memoir turns a personal family mystery into a broader story about grief, inheritance and how writers reconstruct the dead through archives. - The book also adds to Rogow’s long literary career, which spans poetry, translation, theater and essays.

What happened: - Zack Rogow’s “Hugging My Father’s Ghost: A Memoir of a Shortened Life” is being released in a new revised edition on Oct. 6, 2026. - Cirque Press is publishing the book. - Rogow wrote the hybrid memoir to understand his father, Lee Rogow, who died in a plane crash when Zack Rogow was 3. - The memoir uses a dialogue between Rogow and his late father’s writings.

The details: - Lee Rogow was a widely published fiction writer, a drama critic for the Hollywood Reporter, a Manhattan figure in the 1950s and a U.S. Navy landing craft captain in World War II. - Rogow’s research took him from New York’s Upper West Side to Fire Island and into long-held family secrets about his parents and godparents. - The book includes material Lee Rogow published during his lifetime, along with stories and journals that remained secret for 70 years after his death. - The memoir is available through major online booksellers, including Amazon, and by request at local independent bookstores and libraries. - The print ISBN is 979-8-90333-744-6. - Cirque Press is based in Anchorage, Alaska.

Between the lines: - The memoir positions literary investigation as a form of emotional recovery, with Rogow using his father’s own words as both evidence and companionship. - The advance praise from Robert Pinsky, Phillip Lopate and Judith Barrington suggests the book is being framed as both a family memoir and a serious literary work. - Rogow’s decision to use a hybrid form fits the subject matter, since the story mixes biography, memory, recovered writing and unresolved family history.

What's next: - The revised edition will reach readers through online retailers, independent bookstores and libraries. - Rogow’s recent visibility could help drive attention to the memoir, after earlier 2026 coverage for his poetry collection “The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging.” - AARP is set to feature that poetry project in print this fall.

The bottom line: - Rogow’s new memoir is less a straight family history than a literary excavation of absence, memory and the father he never got to know.