After describing his family--how his father died when Sweeney was three, leaving six children, how his mother worked tirelessly and his oldest brother became the male head of the household--Sweeney goes on to introduce the three men he chose to be his subsitute fathers, but that only takes a few pages for each. The rest of the book is taken up with Sweeney's youth: inheriting his brother's paper route, playing baseball, pranks and mischief (he and his friends used to collect gunpowder from used casings at the Navy base and use it to blow things up), learning to drink in high school, and so forth. We hear a little bit about his interactions with his chosen fathers, notably the one "man to man" talk which got him off the path towards excessive drinking. But until the conclusion, which briefly analyses what he learned from each of the three, it's not really much about them. There's some insight into the damage repression of grief does; the family doesn't talk about their dad and his death until the kids are grown.

As a side note, Father Figures has an arrestingly hideous cover--extreme closeup of a boy sitting and holding an enormous orange balloon(?) in front of him, cropped so that all you see is one dirty scabbed knee, ugly shorts, a bit of T-shirt and arm, and one quarter of an orange circle taking up most of the cover. It's unsettling in a way the book absolutely isn't, and I think it might make people who might enjoy the book hesitate to pick it up, while suggesting some dark tale of child abuse to others who would then be disappointed.