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Family Memoirs: Because not all happy families are alike and not all unhappy families are unique

By Jesse Kornbluth
Published: Nov 19, 2018
Category: Memoir

Angela’s Ashes
He certainly can’t be said to have had an enjoyable childhood. His parents were poor. His father drank. In five and a half years, his mother had six children — and three of them died. There was no indoor plumbing. Little food. A downer? Not at all. Though horrifying, the book is incredibly funny. The reason: Frank McCourt waited to write until he was beyond bitterness. “I couldn’t have written this book 15 years ago because I was carrying a lot of baggage around,” he says. “I had attitudes, and these attitudes had to be softened. I had to become, as it says in the Bible, as a child, and the child started to speak in this book. And that was the only way to do it, without judging.” McCourt wouldn’t judge, but everyone else did. And they all said pretty much the same thing: McCourt does for Limerick what Joyce did for Dublin.

Bettyville
At the surface level, “Bettyville” is a simple story: a charming but difficult man comes home to care for his charming but difficult mother. Betty, in her 90s, is winding down, suffering from dementia “or maybe worse.” George Hodgman was once a valued editor at Vanity Fair — where, in my day, the office politics were so Mandarin that putting out the magazine was almost an afterthought — and at a publisher. He got downsized; now he’s a freelance book editor in Manhattan. But his father’s dead, and he’s an only child. Off he goes to Paris, Missouri (population: 1,220).

Born Standing Up
Steve Martin’s father wanted to be an actor, so he moved his wife and two children from Waco, Texas to Hollywood in 1950. He didn’t make it, was forced to work in real estate to support his family, and became withdrawn, sullen and enraged. His son withdrew — and was beaten, one time seriously, for his “attitude.” Martin notes that “a complicated childhood can lead to a life in the arts. I tell you this story of my father and me to let you know I am qualified to be a comedian.”

Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?
Roz Chast’s parents were Brooklyn Jews. They met in the 5th grade, got married without really dating, did everything together. Elizabeth was a tough-as-a-boot school administrator. (Beware “the Chast blast.”) George was a teacher. Roz was their only child. In 1990, when she was pregnant with her second child, Roz moved to Connecticut. Marriage, parenting, career — an entire decade slipped away without a visit to Brooklyn. That’s right: Her parents are closing in on 90, and Roz hasn’t visited them in a decade. And then…

Eudora Welty: One Writer’s Beginnings
Eudora Welty’s story begins in Jackson, Mississippi, where, as a girl, she would listen to her parents whistle “The Merry Widow” to one another in the morning as she — get this — buttoned her shoes. This is a world of grandfather clocks and train schedules, of a mother who read to her daughter at any time of day, of sets of Dickens. And it’s a world of stories, people talking to one another and a kid trying to figure out what they mean — take away the props, upgrade the technology, and it could be your childhood.

Exiles
Michael Arlen — author of a novel called “The Green Hat” — may be more successful than his friends F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. But Michael Arlen isn’t who he looks like; he was born Dikran Kouyoumdjian, an Armenian. In London, he won’t fit in. Ditto in New York and the South of France. And his wife isn’t exactly who she looks like either. Exiles. So their son, Michael J. Arlen, thinks of them. Exiles? How can that be — they had it all. Michael Arlen’s photograph was on the cover of Time Magazine. In the South of France, he owned the very best speedboat and hired a driver for it. Willie Maugham and Winston Churchill came for lunch. “The day he arrived in Chicago, the Daily News ran a front-page story — saying that he had arrived in Chicago.” But when the fame went away, he was beached.

Fun Home
The story is about a father and a daughter. The girl is Alison Bechdel, a lesbian who grows up to be a cartoonist. Her father is Bruce Bechdel, who she describes as “a manic-depressive, closeted fag.” A few weeks after she tells her parents she’s gay, her father is killed — Bechdel is convinced it was suicide — by a Sunbeam Bread Truck.

Joan Didion: The Year of Magical Thinking
Joan Didion and John Dunne both wrote at home, they looked over each other’s work, they had dinner together — after decades of marriage, they were inseparable and glad of it. Yes, Joan had MS and John had a bum ticker, but year after year, there they were, getting away with it. And then their only daughter Quintana took ill. Seriously ill, in-a-coma and near-death ill. And they came home from seeing her in the hospital and John sat down to read and have a Scotch. And then “he stopped talking” and “slumped motionless.” Joan had a card in the kitchen with the phone number of a hospital on it — “in case someone in the building needed an ambulance.” She called. People came. They worked on John and then they took him to the hospital. A man was waiting. He was not wearing scrubs. “I’m your social worker,” he told Joan, and, as she writes, “I guess that is when I must have known.”

Lacks Self-Control: True Stories I Waited Until My Parents Died To Tell
You know what they say: when it comes to disposing of your dead mother’s cremated remains, the three most important things are location, location, location. And we were stuck on Important Thing One. It’s not that the discussion between me and my brothers had gotten contentious; but we were finding it more difficult to come to a consensus on how or where to spread her ashes than the UN’s efforts to handle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And, yes, a Two-Urn Solution was discussed. After my father’s memorial service, my brothers and I gathered at the family house to divvy up the task of going through his things and deciding what to keep, what to donate, and what to throw away. My older brother picked photos, personal papers, and assorted collectibles. My younger brother got clothes, business papers, and books. I was put in charge of the porn.


Lift
Kelly Corrigan’s love letter to her two young daughters becomes a meditation on Rilke’s line, “The knowledge of impermanence that haunts our days is their very fragrance.”

Monsieur Proust
Messenger, housekeeper, confidante, friend, nurse — until his death in 1922, Celeste Albaret spent more time with Proust than anyone else. Indeed, she spent more time at Proust’s home than she did in her own. As her memoir attests, she begrudged not a minute of those hours in his service. Early on, she left Proust’s apartment to go to church. “There will be plenty of time for that after I’m dead,” he said. She never went to church again while he was alive. Proust — the man and the writer — came first. “Time contained no hours,” she writes, “just a certain number of definite things to be done every day.” And yet, no matter how exacting his demands, she never entered his room without a smile.

Please Excuse My Daughter
Julie Klam is a Princess, not born but bred. Her father has achieved a house in Bedford (the Westchester town that is the weekend home to Ralph Lauren, Martha Stewart and a legion of WASPs) that comes with many acres and the appropriate assortment of animals. But Dad’s busy. She’s her mother’s daughter. And her mother, no feminist, spends her time reading, yakking on the phone and shopping. Does Mom care that Julie is flunking everything?

Reading My Father
William Styron was asleep when his four kids — three girls and a boy — went off to school. In the afternoon, when they returned home, he wasn’t to be disturbed. “So it was sometimes not until he came out to prepare dinner or sharpen his pencils that I ever got a glimpse of him,” Alexandra Styron writes. At which point he might tell a story calculated to frighten his youngest daughter. Or ask her to produce a bottle of wine. Which led to a night of drinking and parental conversations on the order of “I can’t stand it any more…Oh, Bill, please don’t be that way. Fuck you! I’m leaving.”

The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family’s Century of Art and Loss
Here we are in the highest echelons of Society in pre-World War I Paris. Nazi thugs and Austrian collaborators. A gay heir who takes refuge in Japan. Style. Seduction. Rothschild-level wealth. Two centuries of anti-Semitism. And 264 pieces of netsuke, the pocket-sized ivory-or-wood sculpture first made in Japan in the 17thcentury. It is on these netsuke that de Waal hangs his tale — or, rather, searches for it. Decades after he apprenticed as a potter in Japan, he has returned to research his mentor. In the afternoons, he makes pots. And, one afternoon a week, he visits his great-uncle Iggie.

The Price of Illusion
From her parents, Joan Buck learned “how things looked and where they came from and how old they were and whether they went together.” In short order, “surface became everything, surface became substance. I clung to inanimate objects and gave my allegiance to things.” This lesson is cemented for her as she watches John Huston draw, “more interested in his pencil than in what anyone said.” The front door of her parents’ home was painted midnight blue, “the same color as the Duke of Windsor’s dinner jackets.” The walls: “Dior gray.” Her father “knew that the key to success was the perception of success.” But then Peter O’Toole drifts away. The money no longer gushes like oil….

The Tender Bar
J.R. Moehringer’s father, a noted disc jockey, was out of his mother’s life before J.R. was old enough to remember that he was ever around. (“My father was a man of many talents, but his one true genius was disappearing.”) His mother, suddenly poor, moves into her family’s house in Manhasset, Long Island. In that house: J.R.’s mother, grandmother, aunt and five female cousins. Also in that house: Uncle Charlie, a bartender at Dickens, a Manhasset establishment beloved by locals who appreciate liquor in quantity— “every third drink free” — and strong opinions, served with a twist. A boy needs a father. If he doesn’t have one, he needs some kind of man in his life. Or men, because it can indeed take a village.

Wear and Tear
Tracy Tynan is the daughter of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Really. Her father, Ken Tynan, was the bad boy of the English theatrical world. Her mother, Elaine Dundy, was a gifted novelist. But their real talent was for excess. They were loud. Drunk. Unfaithful. Whatever they touched, they broke. Scott and Zelda. They did not break their only child, who should be a basket case and is, instead, a triumph of our species.

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