F a m i l y: To be a term that everyone on the planet is familiar with, its actual definition turns out to be as individual as each person. In reading the new memoir by Isabel Gillies, Happens Every Day, a gut-wrenching, heart rending account of the dissolution of her marriage, the dream of “family” is powerful and moving. Married to a college professor and living in a small town in Ohio with their two little boys, Gillies recalls with grace, candor and poignancy, the details of a life and a family that is falling apart.
“I was wholly in love with my life: two healthy children, a brilliant, tall professor, a husband who was carefully placing the evidence of our happy family all over the bathroom walls so everyone could see. When I came back, there in the main upstairs bathroom, was a love letter to our family, and to me. Frame after frame of generations of us, our people, and the little ones we had made. It was security and peace, and everything I had always wanted.
Josiah left me and the boys a month later…”
This is not a self-pitying rant. It reads like an intimate conversation between friends. It is ultimately a readable, redemptive story about love, marriage, family, heartbreak, and the unexpected turns of a life. I loved it. After finishing the book, I got to thinking about other books, new and old, that talk of “family” and its importance in all of our lives whether intact or something we have lost; we feel its effects forever.
Wyatt Cooper wrote a wonderful book entitled, Families. He was from Quitman, Mississippi, was married to Gloria Vanderbilt and father to newsman, Anderson Cooper. He describes in poetic words what family meant to him.
“They are saying these days that the family is finished, at least as we have known it. That’s a sad and lonely thought. I suppose they may even be right. Everything passes. Other venerable institutions have vanished. Civilizations fall. Worlds end. Gods, even, have died and are dying, so there is no reason to think that anything lasts forever.
Still, for most of us, whatever the stress and strain contained therein, it was from the warmth, support and security of the family nest that we first looked out with wonder at the universe. It was in the shelter of that family that we first glimpsed the complexity of life. It was from the fortress of that circle that we ventured forth to experiment and explore, and back to it that we fled when fears and failures affronted us. There, seeds were planted. There, our characters were formed, our destinies shaped. There, we were to learn almost all we would ever know
of loving.”
His dedication at the front of the book has always stayed in my mind:
“To my two families,
the one that made me
and the one I made.”
In the new memoir by Jane Alison, entitled The Sisters Antipodes, she tells the amazing story of her family which consisted of a mother, father and two little girls. When she was four years old and living in Australia in the 1960s, her family met another that seemed their twin: a father in the Foreign Service, a beautiful mother, and two little girls. With so much in common, the families became inseparable. Within months, affairs had ignited between the adults, and before long the pairs had literally exchanged partners… the fathers swapped!!….they divorced, remarried, and moved on. What resulted was chaos and heartbreak and Alison describes the broken pieces and sense of imbalance that she felt:
“During the seven years after the split, we lived in five houses….but they were just houses, not homes. We didn’t own them but shed them when we moved on.
‘Home’ or ‘house’: ‘Home’ seems roomier, more feel than structure. Yet even ‘house’ can mean more than a building, the House of Windsor, etc. House can be a synagogue, can describe both the structure and those who live in it, the breath, blood, and flesh pacing its hallways, held under the father’s name like a roof.
Father-land, father, and house: ways of knowing who you are, where you’re from.”
We are bound to and by our families and they come in all shapes and sizes. The Help, by Jackson native Kathryn Stockett, tells the fictional account of life in Jackson, Mississippi during the 1960s from various women’s perspectives, both black and white. The book is brand new and wonderful, but I especially enjoyed “The Afterward” where Kathryn talks about her childhood and her own unique ‘family.’
“Our family maid, Demetrie…..came to cook and clean for my family when she was twenty eight. My father was fourteen, and my uncle seven. Demetrie was stout and dark-skinned and, by then, married to a mean, abusive drinker named Clyde. She wouldn’t answer me when I asked questions about him. But besides the subject of Clyde, she’d talk to us all day…
…there were several years when I thought she was immensely lucky to have us. A secure job in a nice house, cleaning up after white Christian people. But also because Demetrie had no babies of her own, and we felt like we were filling a void in her life. If anyone asked her how many children she had, she would hold up her fingers and say three. She meant us: my sister, Susan, my brother, Rob, and me.
My parents divorced when I was six. Demetrie became even more important to me then. When my mother went on one of her frequent trips, Daddy put us kids in the motel he owned and brought in Demetrie to stay with us. I’d cry and cry on Demetrie’s shoulder, missing my mother so bad I’d get a fever from it.
… ‘this is where you belong. Here with me,’ she said, and patted my hot leg. Her hands were always cool. I watched the older kids play cards, not caring as much that Mother was away again. I was where I belonged.”
During the month of April, all of Jackson is celebrating the centennial birthday of one of our favorite authors, Eudora Welty. I can’t end a missive on ‘family’ without including one of her stories as told in the first pages of her book One Writer’s Beginnings.
“When I was young enough to still spend a long time buttoning my shoes in the morning, I’d listen toward the hall: Daddy upstairs was shaving in the bathroom and Mother downstairs was frying the bacon. They would begin whistling back and forth to each other up and down the stairwell. My father would whistle his phrase, my mother would try to whistle, then hum hers back. It was their duet. I drew my buttonhook in and out and listened to it…..I knew it was “The Merry Widow.” The difference was, their song almost floated with laughter: how different from the record, which growled from the beginning, as if the Victrola were only slowly being wound up. They kept it running between them, up and down the stairs where I was now just about ready to run clattering down and show them my shoes.”
-Norma
This unusual, captivating novel seems at first like a love story; yet, as the reader discovers, it is much more, involving a scary brutal attack on a resort beach, a detainee camp in England, a suicide, and a four year old boy perpetually dressed as Batman. Rotating locales between London and Nigeria, the author weaves a story about a mature and brave sixteen year old refugee girl and a malfunctioning disconnected English family.An unlikely intimate friendship develops between the English wife, a career driven London journalist unhappily balancing her job and husband and lover, and the Nigerian girl named Little Bee, charging this unique novel with intensity and fully driven emotion rarely seen in a novel. Readers will revel in the life truths represented and will hold on for a very surprising and unforgettable ride.
