It is amazing what different worlds books can take you in to. The last one was all about the challenges of being an Icelandic sheep farmer. This one is all about the challenges of having a charismatic aunt.
It’s an odd memoir, almost a misery memoir, except the misery is of so very niche and specific a kind it’s hard to take it seriously. At the nub of it is his aunt, who is not just the sister of his father but also the wife of his mother’s brother. That is, siblings married siblings. One couple had three children (including Michael, the author, the oldest), and the other none. The mothers of both pairs of siblings live together, and everyone lives walking distance from each other.
Now that I write that, it’s clearly a recipe for trouble. The trouble comes in the form of this aunt, who is a very successful and wealthy screenwriter, very charismatic, and very obsessed with Michael. She constantly singles him out for attention, non-sexual but very intense, and the only thing is, he needs to agree with her. This is okay when he was younger, though a measure of the bizarreness is that she recommends to him – when he is just eight – OF HUMAN BONDAGE and SONS AND LOVERS. “Take my word for it, Lovey, between (them) you’ll learn everything you need to know about what it feels like to be a certain kind of young person. Your kind, if I may say.” These are not child appropriate books, unless of course that child is tortured artistically and sexually.
Anyway, as he heads to adolescence he naturally rebels, and in parallel his aunt becomes increasingly unstable. Nothing actually specifically bad really happens; no one even gets a slap. The most extreme is someone going home from holiday in Paris early. This is not exactly the high water mark of human suffering. But clearly Frank was troubled enough to write a whole book about it. And his parents agree: in later life, they apologize for not protecting him from whatever it was his aunt was.
There’s an interesting side point on his mother being involved in early feminism, where suburban women held “CR groups” that is, consciousness raising groups. One result of this is that she stops allowing the aunt to decorate their house – which indeed was a weird part of the family dynamic.
In writing this post it sounds rather as if I didn’t enjoy this book. However I did. It’s always interesting to see the specific craziness of someone else’s family. And I’m always amazed by memoirs: who even remembers their past that clearly? My theory is, nobody does; but I always admire the boldness of someone willing to write up their fantasy of what happened