memoirs: family matters
"all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"
Today I’ve got another installment of memoirs1 for you, this one re: family.
I’ve had some recent interactions with my parents and siblings that have been quite revelatory to realize how each of us experienced and interpreted the same events. Sharing what we all understood or didn’t, what we did or refused to do, what our secrets, motivations and assumptions were in a given environment all created a richer picture that is bittersweet to understand more fully years later. I’m struck by how beautiful it is that relationships, even the closest ones, are not static but organic and alive. Of course, that flexibility can result in a plethora of evolutions, not all positive or negative but usually a mishmash of every sort. This is story, the power of sharing it individually and collectively. There is a sort of magical alchemy in asking, confronting and identifying one’s own experience while inviting another to do the same knowing it may then reframe what you knew. This demands openness, humility, bravery and, hopefully, an expansive acceptance and wider understanding all around. How are you changed with these questions and how are you changed with the answering, whether they are posed to oneself or one’s family. This work is painful, sharp and convoluted with no guidebook included. Nor is it ended, but begun again and again, each time building upon more and more stories.
If you’ve not noticed, I’m quite a judgmental person2 but I’m working on being curious, asking questions and trying to be more comfortable with ambiguity, the grey and the human. I assume this mindset must be top of mind for memoirists and I applaud this attitude of introspection. I can imagine writing a work about something as personal as family must be a mind fuck at times, especially knowing some of them may read it and perhaps even lamenting that some of them cannot. Not only are these authors confronting, identifying and revealing their own internal selves, but they are sharing something of their family’s as well which has got to be heavy, messy and weird for all involved.
Today we’ve got a book about mom, one about dad and another about recreating the family structure into something new with every narrator confronting then redefining themselves within their family context. These are exceptionally raw with varied tones as comedy, tragedy, mystery, betrayal, guilt, sex, loss and grief all contribute to each author’s journey as they explore, question, grasp, claw and seek within familial relationships that refuse stagnation. Relationships to themselves and their families crash, explode and crumble as they are puzzled and patchworked into something new. My deep thanks to these authors for their willingness to go down memory lane, wondering and wandering to assemble a picture of family and themselves that is just that much clearer, inspiring readers along the way.
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
Michelle Zauner grew up in Oregon and had a complicated relationship with her Korean mother. Though she often clashed with her mom’s exacting expectations, food was a point of connection, of creativity and where she could interact with her Korean roots. Michelle eventually moved to the East Coast and explored various worlds as she forged her own path; music, food, relationships. When she was in her mid-twenties her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer and Michelle moved home to help care for her. This excruciating time allowed for a reconnection and reexamining of her mother, her background and her own identity.
It is honestly absurd for one person to be so talented, but here we are. Michelle is now a very successful singer and her writing here is exquisite: beautiful, moving and frank. She describes herself and her family so honestly; layering the ugly, inconvenient and the physical and emotional messiness of being human with beauty, curiosity and love creating a work uniquely poignant and completely gut wrenching. Food plays a pivotal role in her story and she writes about it so tangibly that you can just about taste and smell it from the page and she envelopes such rich emotion into these scenes. Don’t read this book hungry and be prepared with tissues.
Having a parent is consistently complicated; they are people and are never entirely the person that we want. How could they be? In turn, how could we possibly be the exact child they want? This book explores the evolution of understanding that is possible when we allow our expectations and understandings the freedom to alter, evolve and become kaleidoscopic instead of stagnant. As Michelle grows up in life and understanding and love for her identity and her mother she explores a wider definition of herself, one that is hard won and laden with meaning, possibility and care.
Extra Credit #1: Don’t sleep on the author’s band delightful pop band Japanese Breakfast.
Extra Credit #2: I’m not sure at all how this happened, but one of the podcasts I produce, Spilled Milk, had Michelle Zauner on as a guest to chat about Korean rice cakes/tteok. Listen here.
Extra Credit #3: A movie may be in the works!
Extra Credit #4: Read her New Yorker essay of the same name
I’ve just never met someone like you," as if I were a stranger from another town or an eccentric guest accompanying a mutual friend to a dinner party. It was a strange thought to hear from the mouth of the woman who had birthed and raised me, with whom I shared a home for eighteen years, someone who was half me. My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.
Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
This is a repeat as I briefly mentioned it in my first post3, a review of my favorite books from 2023.
Patricia Lockwood grew up in the Midwest with a set of supremely fascinating and individualistic parents. Her crass, free spirited father decided to become a Catholic priest later in life, already having a wife and kid, and her mother’s worldview didn’t always track with reality. Growing up with parents in this bizarro Wes Anderson-esque environment meant that she was formed in a grey space that muddied the sacred and the profane, the sane and the insane, the sense and the nonsense. This memoir jumps around between the author’s childhood and a period of time in her adulthood where unexpected circumstances required her to move back in with her parents. Being thrust back into her childhood environment, with a husband in tow, allows her the chance to confront her past and parents to form a new understanding of her family, her spirituality and ultimately, herself.
A compelling character study, this one is all about the delivery. Lockwood’s voice positively drips in wit as she invites the reader into this almost Wonderland-like world where darkness and light, the absurd and the holy combine with the hilarious, weird, mundane and bewildering. As she recounts various misadventures both comic and tragic, she further reveals her family to us and it eventually becomes clear that she is just as idiosyncratic as they are. This one showcases just how many glorious multitudes people contain and Lockwood expertly crafts a nuanced tone as she deals with events that are often equally ridiculous and horrifying. I especially appreciated her thoughts working through Christianity. Though I had a much different childhood, I connected strongly with Lockwood’s confrontations of her religious upbringing and its maddening contradictions, embracing of patriarchy and complicity with the state. It helped me be bold enough to identify the cognitive dissonance in my own past and to be of many minds about it, not pressured to feel all one way or all the other.
My father despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean Hillary Clintons covered all over with feminist leg fur. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun. Consequently our own soft sinner, a soulful snowshoe named Alice, will stay shut in the bedroom upstairs, padding back and forth on cashmere paws, campaigning for equal pay, educating me about my reproductive system, and generally plotting the downfall of all men.
The Fixed Stars by Molly Wizenberg
Show-off Bias alert: I am lucky enough to know Molly in real life!4
Molly Wizenberg, a writer and restaurant co-owner, was a married mother of one when she was surprised to find herself attracted to a woman while serving on jury duty in her mid 30s. The growing understanding that she wasn’t as straight as she’d assumed herself to be catapulted her into unexpected and uncharted territory. Confused, overwhelmed and apprehensive at this life overhaul, Molly followed her curiosity through intellectual, emotional and physical avenues as she questioned her self, her sexuality, her assumed role and the structure of her family. She takes the reader along her meandering and messy ups and downs during a time of incredible upheaval as she learns what she wants to claim and name for herself.
This book departs from Molly’s earlier writings as it steps away from a food centric lens and the story is explored in short vignettes which makes it compulsively readable. Her voice is raw and direct as she searches; searches herself, her memories, the world and words, curious and hopeful for understanding, clarity, permission and definition. Her specificity makes a scene come alive and I sometimes felt almost guilty, as if I were a voyeur leering greedily into a friend’s life. As someone who grew up being taught a dangerously dogmatic view of queerness, Molly’s inclusions of the roadmap of words and ideas that populated her growing understanding of herself, her family and her new community was immensely interesting and helpful.
Extra Credit #1: Molly used to write the James Beard award winning food blog Orangette and now writes a superb Substack called I’ve Got a Feeling that brings canny, bright and lovingly specific attention to the everyday.
Extra Credit #2: Molly is the co-host of the previously mentioned podcast I produce, Spilled Milk, where she tolerates her co-host Matthew, goes too deep into corporate history and sometimes laughs till she cries. We have fun. You should listen.
In the fiction of the self, the self is both author and character: We are constantly writing the novel of ourselves, inventing more and more of it on demand, in response to what the world asks of us. In this way, parts of us that are not exactly known or defined at one time become better defined as we go on creating; we can't undo anything, but we can clarify and interpret. …
I'd wanted so much to have a story that behaved, but instead I have a self.
Have you read any of these? Do you have any other family centric memoirs to share?
previous installment = memoirs: body and mind
see all my thoughts on covers
in fact i just saw her yesterday. we played balderdash. this sounds made up but i assure you it is not.
I've been meaning to go back and comment on this, because when this newsletter showed up in my inbox I literally said, "YES THIS IS MY JAM." I have read two of these three (haven't read Priestdaddy) and they were both so good. Hard to choose which to recommend among the many family memoirs I've read in recent years. Nicole Chung's two books, for sure. While it's even more a family history than a memoir, I really liked Mott Street by Ava Chin. I enjoy memoirs in which the authors are researching and making discoveries about their family, like Inheritance by Dani Shapiro. I just started reading Group Living and Other Recipes, a memoir by Lola Milholland.
Priestdaddy finally got added to our digital library catalog! I’ve been wanting to read it since your last post that included it, so I’m glad you mentioned it again.