Thanksgiving is quintessentially a family festival. Never mind that improbable tale about Indians and turkeys, this week is all about families getting together. Everybody agrees that the family is a good thing. "Family values" has become an all-purpose term of moral approval, even though, if you look at it globally, "family values" around the world embrace everything from the blood feud and honor killing to ritual mutilation. It’s all a matter of taste. Even here in the United States the term "Family Values" is so elastic as to be virtually meaningless, which is why politicians love it so much.
Family itself is a flexible institution. In some cultures it may include multiple wives and hundreds or even thousands of remote relatives. In others, like ours, it may be just two or three people living together. Yet every nation and culture has a family system of some kind. We need it as a refuge from the seven billion other people in the world who don't know or care anything about us. If our family is nonexistent, or unsatisfactory, we can expand it by adding dogs, cats or other creatures. Some of the most valued members of our family are covered in fur. Other people adopt celebrities as imaginary members of their family, some have close emotional relationships with sports teams, or work colleagues, friends or congregations, lodges or drinking buddies. We find real comfort and security in the familiar faces, voices and opinions of the family, whoever they are.
When I was young I was intensely curious about the somewhat mysterious history our family, which was never discussed. But I was always told: "Ask no questions and you will hear no lies." But I kept on asking questions, and heard plenty of lies, which were always interesting and informative in their own way. Every family has its authorized stories, endlessly repeated at family gatherings, and its less authorized stories that appear later in the evening after a glass of wine or two when the children have gone to bed.
I don’t know whether families still sit around the festive table and tell stories the way my family did. Do people still tell stories in the smart phone age, or does everyone sit silently around the turkey table, eyes down on the tiny screen? That would be a great loss because, however fanciful they are, such stories may be the only family history we will ever know.
Perhaps, in this confessional age, everyone is saving their best stories for their memoirs, where they can find a wider audience. Just try, for example, a wonderfully revealing book by the British playwright Alan Bennett called Untold Stories.
Any honest memoir makes you wonder how many layers of unspoken truth lie under the surface of every family's public story. That's fascinating, it piques the curiosity and tempts us to go digging for those family secrets we suspect may be there. But do we really want to do this to our family? As a memoirist myself I would say: “Don’t do it!” not this week, and not any week. A tell-all memoir may be the best revenge, but a family stays together only because we don’t ask too many questions, and accept our family stories as they are.
Copyright: David Bouchier
