Family Connections
Categories: Staff Picks , Nonfiction
It's the day before Thanksgiving, which is the quintessential American family holiday, and I have the peculiar nature of the family on the brain. Families are funny. No, let's face it, most of our families are quirky, odd, downright weird.
Because of all the shared history involved, it can be hard to tell a family story correctly and succinctly. Some things translate, and some don't work at all. For instance, although I can explain to strangers why nearly every gift my aunt Dar gets has a goose on it somewhere (she had a fundamentally bad experience with a goose when all my aunts were children), I'm not nearly as capable of elucidating why another of my aunts has an entire photo album full of pig posteriers.
That's why a good family memoir makes for such a great book. Explaining personal history from scratch is such an accomplishment, it really awes me. Plus there's something comforting about playing Peeping Tom on someone else's family. It helps to know we're all strange in various ways.
So, After you encounter the relatives this year, here are a few memoirs that might make their strangeness seem a little more relative:
- Funny in Farsi: A memoir of growing up Iranian in America (don't miss the chapter on Thanksgiving turkey!)
- Glass Castle: A memoir The story of Jeanette Walls' very unconventional childhood.
- Microthrills: True stories from a life of small highs Worth it, if only for the picture of the author's grandfather (who looks an awful lot like Einstein).
- Playground: A childhood lost inside the playboy mansion The daughter of Hef's pysician tells the story of her childhood.
- Dream Birds: The strange history of the ostrich in fashion, food, and fortune Partly a natural and social history of ostriches, partly a memoir of growing up on a South African ostrich farm.
- Atomic Farmgirl: Growing up right in the wrong place A tale of a nearly ideal childhood from the heartland of America, except for the nuclear waste.
Special Bonus Section
In the course of looking for family memoirs, I got to talking with some of my coworkers, who graciously agreed to let me share some stories of their own quirky families. (forgive any errors in transcription, my shorthand isn't too great)
J: There's nothing all too quirky about my family; we're Episcopalian. Actually though, how we got to be Episcopalian is kind of funny. Great-grandpa was an alcoholic, so the kids had to find ways to make money to pay for necessities. My grandfather and his brother found paying positions with an Episcopal boys choir and made enough to pay the rent. This also led to the great Trinity Boys' Choir Fishcake Fight of 1905, but that's another story...
M: This wasn't MY family mind you, but I remember [name withheld]'s family on Thanksgiving. The men would eat too much of course, and after dinner they'd undo the top button on their pants. Sometimes though, this wouldn't relieve enough of the pressure and so they'd take their pants off entirely...
A: My twin sisters speak their own language. Also, one of them will talk to me pretending to be my dog in a really high voice...
N: I have a sister who's a hypochondriac. She says she has a metal plate in her head which she got during her last year of high school, which is really funny because I was there and I don't remember it at all...
What's your quirky family story? Leave a comment!
1 Comment
Maria, You are an excellent blog writer. I particularly like this one because I love a good dysfunctional family memoir. It makes me feel as though my family isn’t so off kilter after all. I get the 20 questions of how I can live as a vegetarian each year. Actually they don’t ask questions… they just talk about themselves… “oh I could just never do that… not eat Turkey and all… What would I have for lunch!”