Fiction Ruined My Family
“At its core this is the story of an adult looking back at her parents’ choices and trying to make sense of ‘how people with their kind of talent, charm, intelligence and privileged backgrounds could wind up like them.’ It’s about getting beyond bewilderment or resentment to recover and discover that for all their faults even fallible parents love their children because they are parents, the same reason their children love them.”
Fiction Ruined My Family is Jeanne Darst’s story of life with a hopelessly unrealistic father who is “gonna sell this novel, this is the one,” and a depressed alcoholic mother who “just had a light cry going most of the time.”
To say Ms. Darst puts it all out there leaving little to the imagination is nearly as understated as her frequently acidic wit. Recounting her parent’s inexplicable choices would be mean if it weren’t hilarious and hilarious—and if it weren’t true.
The early chapters are a collection of bizarre sketches that are less about creating a chronological or dramatic arc and more about establishing the repetition of peculiar behavior and uncertainty that characterized her family’s life. It’s that repetition that puts the reader inside her family’s absurdness, calling to mind the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
Ms. Darst’s frontal language is not for the fainthearted or those offended by four-letter words. In a chapter titled Crabs and Rehab, she uses the “F” word and slightly tamer versions of the “C” word enough to feel you’ve been hit in the head repeatedly with a two by four—not unlike what she must have felt growing up in this family.
But Ms. Darst’s language is not the crux of this story. At its core this is the story of an adult looking back at her parents’ choices and trying to make sense of “how people with their kind of talent, charm, intelligence and privileged backgrounds could wind up like them.” It’s about getting beyond bewilderment or resentment to recover and discover that for all their faults even fallible parents love their children because they are parents, the same reason their children love them.
On her journey to “recovery” (a word Ms. Darst dislikes as much as she “despised the ‘language of the heart’ recovery slogans,” she fears she may be so reliant on alcohol to operate that she’ll lose herself, her brain, her sense of humor, her ability with people. Considering her talent for one-liners in Fiction Ruined My Family, she can put her fears to rest.