Thanksgiving is quintessentially a family festival. Never mind that improbable story about Indians and turkeys, this week is all about families getting together.
Everyone agrees that the family is a good thing, and that “family values” are good values, even though, around the world, what constitutes a family varies enormously. 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 even culture has a family system of some sort. We need it as a refuge from the six billion other people in the world who don’t know or care anything about us. If our family is small, or 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 a familial relationship with sports teams, or work colleagues or friends, congregations, lodges or drinking buddies. Only the familiar faces, voices and opinions of the family, whoever they are, can give real comfort and security.
Our own family is always the hardest to understand, because it’s so close that it blurs, and is blurred quite deliberately. When I was young I was intensely curious about our family, but I was always told: “Ask no questions and you’ll hear no lies.” But I kept on asking questions, and heard plenty of lies, which were always interesting and informative in their own way. In later years I sometimes taught workshops on memoir writing, and everyone wanted to write about their family, either to memorialize it as an ideal, or to get their revenge. I encouraged them to dig deep for the truth, but not many were willing to do that. Instead they tended to write from their emotions, producing either family horror stories of unbelievable nastiness, or Norman Rockwell portraits of perfection. The second type was the least interesting.
Let’s face it, happy families are rather dull. Tolstoy said it most famously in Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." A happy family may be a great gift to those who are lucky enough to have one, but it makes poor material for a novel or a memoir. Nobody would want to have Thanksgiving dinner with the awful Lamberts in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections for example, or Mary Karr’s ghastly family in her memoir The Liar’s Club. But we like to read about them. They make our own family seem just about perfect.
If they do seem just about perfect it probably means that we are missing something. Every family has its secrets, and how intriguing they are. When we read the work of a fearless memoirist like David Sedaris, or the English playwright Allan Bennett, we are reminded how much is hidden behind every family’s public face. But this week is no time to indulge our curiosity. This is the week when we should listen to the family stories, and believe everything we hear.
Have a good Thanksgiving.
Copyright: David Bouchier
