Daddy is Danielle Steel's 1989 novel about a marriage that comes apart when Sarah, after eighteen years as a wife and mother, decides to pursue graduate studies at Harvard rather than remain at home with her husband Oliver and their three children. Feeling that she sacrificed a promising, independent life for domesticity, she leaves, and Oliver is left to raise Benjamin, Melissa and young Sam largely on his own.
The novel follows how each family member absorbs the rupture. Benjamin, the oldest, drops out of high school after his girlfriend becomes pregnant and tries to build an adult life of his own before he is ready. Oliver, meanwhile, is forced to rebuild both his household and his sense of himself, including new relationships with Megan Townsend and later Charlotte, while also confronting his widowed father's own late-life change and his mother's decline with Alzheimer's disease.
At its core, Daddy is a story about parental responsibility, the cost family dissolution exacts on children, and the possibility of second chances after a life's plan collapses. It was published by Delacorte Press on October 1, 1989, as Steel's twenty-fifth novel.