Twisted. Messed up. Unusual. Freakish. Call them what you may, but let's face it: there are a lot of dysfunctional families out there. In my humble opinion (and experience), there are many of us escaping from upbringings more reminiscent of a really bad soap opera, than “Leave It to Beaver.” Unfortunately, I am included in the former group, and then some. I don't mean to poke fun at those who had really dreadful, traumatic childhoods, as mine was not a walk in the park. But after a bump or two (or ten), some great friends and extra help, I can now laugh at (read: mock) or at least not cry about my childhood these days.
We are all at different points on the path to healing from some of these odd or awful childhoods, and maybe even the crummy choices we made as a result of them. Yet, as I noted last month, my book club buddies got me to see I wasn't an island in a sea of perfect families. Indeed, if the old idiom is true: “What doesn't kill you makes you stronger,” you probably have some friends who can truly move mountains!
That all being said, I find it instructive, sometimes enjoyable, sometimes heart wrenching, and often cathartic to read fiction that details the unusual family. Even more fascinating is how the individuals within said families respond to their situations. Do they sink in misery for a few decades or run as far as possible from the past? Meander or bolt for home like a carrier pigeon? Fiction provides a safe way for us to explore the intricacies of the injured heart and cultivate a deeper understanding of ourselves or a greater empathy for others.
This month's selections deal with a dying mother and her talented daughter, a young academic and her siblings coping with life in the aftermath of their parents' death, and a family full of secrets that do nothing but destroy those who come near.
The Fiction Class, Susan Breen
“Why weren't you [the teacher] writing on the blackboard?” her mother asks...
“I was just tired, and I sat down.”
“Oh.” She waits for her mother to press her, to say that [she] has no idea what it means to be tired. Try taking care of a sick man for twenty-five years... and then you'll know the meaning of tired. But her mother is quiet. 1
Aspiring writer Arabella Hicks is pushing forty, unmarried, unpublished, and living in Manhattan. She has been writing her own Great American Novel for seven years now, but just can't quite find the ending she needs. Heck! She can't even find a date for the weekend! In her off time, she teaches a creative writing workshop one night a week. And every week after class she visits her dying, overbearing mother in a nearby nursing home, smuggling in a burger and fries in an attempt to bring her mom a little comfort from the outside world and play the part of the good daughter.
Through Arabella's eyes, we teach her class, become aquatinted with her colorful cross section of students, write a novel (or try anyway), test a new relationship, and feel her anguish as she enters her mother's bitter and painful world each week. Aching to love her mother, and have that love reciprocated, Arabella pushes through her own tears and disappointment to discover a mother she never knew existed.
The Fiction Class was an enjoyable surprise for me, a spur of the moment grab off the grocery store shelf, and I have to say I was immediately taken. I love Arabella. She is a sweet gal, whose wings are aching to fly but have been weakened by years in her mother's stifling shadow. I expected her story to end well, but I didn't know to how much of it I would relate. In the end: a lot. The difficulty of her mother's life, and the ensuing crustiness, makes it very clear that as children, we very rarely know the minds of our parents. Sadly, this unavoidable part of innocence can lead to many, many misunderstandings in our adult years, as Arabella finds out.
Breen's novel is well-paced and replete with a complement of interesting, well-constructed characters. As an added perk, a fun and unconventional addition to the text awaits you at the end of each “class” chapter. I challenge you to complete these assignments and share them with your group.
Anyone who had or has difficult moms will appreciate The Fiction Class, and those who didn't will rejoice!
Note: This story is set in Manhattan, not Mayberry. It is truly quite tame, but there is still the odd thought or comment that may not sit well with a few, starting with a class character named like a Bond Girl.
Reading Group Guide
Crow Lake, Mary Lawson
I don't know why I suddenly saw it then. Maybe because they were both so intent on the subject,
so absorbed. Two remarkable men, deep in conversation, walking slowly across the dust of the farmyard. It was not a tragic picture. Definitely not. 2
Take four fairly happy siblings, two teen aged brothers, Luke and Matt, and their much younger sisters, Bo and Katie, ages two and seven, and put them in a pleasant, but humble home in Nowhere, Canada. Next, remove their parents in a sudden, deadly car accident, and you have the beginnings of Crow Lake .
Told in flashbacks by Katie, a present day zoology professor in Toronto, every thing that happened from the day her parents left the house and never returned was one tragedy upon the next. Intelligent children in the frozen north with limited opportunity and even more limited funds, Katie's oldest brother Luke forgoes a scholarship to stay at home and work in order to keep the family together, and so Matt, the “smart” brother,” will at least graduate from high school. Upon graduation, Matt receives a university scholarship, but on the eve of his leaving it is revealed he, too, will be staying at home for family.
It takes Katie to finally be able to break free from the gravity of their small town and difficult upbringing. She succeeds by finally achieving what her brothers did not: an education, both at the university level and beyond small town Ontario. Despite her love for her siblings, especially Matt, Katie can not bring herself to stay connected with them. Her personal grief over their dashed hopes and ruined lives, as well as her shame at their lack of formal learning, keeps her away year after year. Only an invitation from Matt's son for his eighteenth birthday party, and a personal note from Matt himself, compel her to finally make the journey home.
However, contemplating the impending trip brings to mind memories she would prefer to forget, and as a result of her return, Katie is confronted with facts about her self and her siblings with which she is unprepared to cope. Largely because her issues are not with her life, but with what she perceives as the waste of her brothers' lives, Katie doesn't even know how to begin to heal the breach in order to reclaim the brothers she once loved so dearly.
Readers with siblings that have taken the “road less travelled” will appreciate this deeply touching and candid portrait of a family seeking to maintain its identity, while still allowing its individual members to achieve their own measure of personal success.
Note: There is some mild, soft PG-13 language in Crow Lake .
Reading Group Guide
Drowning Ruth, Christina Schwarz
Ruth remembered drowning.
“That's impossible,” Aunt Amanda said. “It must have been a dream.”
But Ruth maintained that she had drowned, insisted on it for years, even after she should have known better. 3
One of Ruth's earliest memories seems to be of drowning in the icy lake that edges her family's farm. She insists upon this fact almost as vehemently as her Aunt Amanda, Mandy to most others, refutes it.
The daughter of a Wisconsin farmer and a frequently ill and ineffective mother, Amanda grows up to serve others and put her needs last. Eight years her junior, Mathilda, or Mattie, is exactly opposite. Marrying young to a man with few prospects and little aptitude for farming or fatherhood, Mattie becomes increasingly unable to cope with life after her husband leaves to serve in the war, a new baby and difficult parents only exacerbate the situation.
Amanda, a nurse in Milwaukee, unknowingly and fatally infects her parents with influenza during a brief visit home. Once they pass, she returns to her hospital work, but the gore and stench of the wounded soldiers, along with a failed affair with a local businessman, soon sends her back home to the farm. She just “needs a rest,” she tells herself, a break. That is the first of many lies she tells herself over the coming years.
Upon returning home, Amanda finds dealing with Ruth and an increasingly flighty Mattie, drains her spare resources. Then when Mattie dies in a tragic accident on the ice just weeks before her husband Carl is due home from the war, Amanda is left alone with her niece, and all semblance of the kind and vulnerable Milwaukee nurse seems to vanish.
Like opening a set of Russian nesting boxes, Schwarz reveals what is at the heart of Drowning Ruth twist after unexpected twist until we reach the littlest doll in the middle and find out just how much of what we thought was the truth was really a lie from the start.
Set between World Wars I & II in rural Wisconsin, Drowning Ruth follows the narrative style of Crow Lake by being told in flashbacks, but from multiple characters and differing voices. When not being recounted in the third person, Schwarz uses Amanda to narrate, but Ruth also helps. Her parts are small at first, as she is only a toddler, but as she grows, so does her side of the story. Like many books narrated in this fashion, you have to pay attention. There are moments where it is easy to get “lost in time,” as it were.
Maybe there was no hiding here. Maybe this place was a mistake. But by summer, I assured myself..., it would be different. By summer the island would be shrouded in leaves, and I could keep my business to myself with no one the wiser. 4
Due to the era, there is much that both Amanda and Mattie feel the need to conceal- from their parents, society, each other, and even themselves. Shame, secrecy and fear all drive the plot of Drowning Ruth . There seems to be hardly a single moment that one character or another isn't immersed in some sort of non-disclosure- just piecing together reality becomes a bit of a challenge. Schwarz's tale becomes a case-in-point against the harmful and ignorant practice of starting or even keeping “family secrets.” In the end, they truly serve to protect no one, and generally wreak more damage than the truth ever could.
