So often memoirs wallow in their authors' self-absorption--what looks to be an almost ready-made genre centered on existing memories frequently suffers under memoirists' inability to remember unselfishly, and to narrate their remembrances as dispassionately as good writing requires. A classic example: Elizabeth Wurtzel's astoundingly narcissistic and self-pitying Prozac Nation. And a stunning exception: John Lanchester's Family Romance, a painstaking, measured, and riveting reconstruction of his parents' marriage, with particular attention paid to the life of a mother who, Lanchester discovers after death, had pegged her love for her husband and son to a major and irrevocable lie.

The opening paragraphs are as remarkable as the epigraph I posted last week:

One of the most famous things ever written about family life is the opening sentence of Anna Karenina. "All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." It's a magnificant line, so sonorous and resonant that it makes it easy for us not to notice it isn't true. Part of its falsehood lies in the fact that happy families aren't especially alike, and more than unhappy ones are unalike. But at a deeper level, the falsehood lies in the idea that a family is either happy or unhappy. Life, family life, just isn't that simple. Most families are both happy and unhappy, often intensely so, and often at the same time. A sense of safety can be a feeling of trappedness; a delight in routine can be suffocating boredom; a parent's humor and unpredictability can be a maddeningly misplaced childishness--and in many cases, the feeling is simultaneous. I was both happy and unhappy as a child, just as my parents were both happy and unhappy, and just as almost everyone else is.

Another way in which our family resembled everyone else's was that we had secrets. All families have secrets. Sometimes they are of the variety that a family keeps from outsiders; sometimes they are the sort that a family keeps from itself; sometimes they are the sort to whose presence no one consciously admits. But they are almost always there. People have a deep need for secrets. The question is what to do with them and about them, and when to let them go.

Highly recommended.

Are family secrets (of the non-trivial sort) really almost ubiquitious? Is this an aspect of the "let it all out" modern style of being expected to provide every last detail of one's most intimate moments?

P.S. By "trivial" I mean things that are either highly personal (such as the precise prescription for my medicines) or naturally secret (such as the exact dolllar amount in my checking account on the last statement).