Thanksgiving is all about families, and their stories – because a family is nothing without its stories. Just about everyone agrees that the family is a good thing and that “family values” are good values. But families and their values vary enormously around the world. In some cultures, a family 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 in isolation together. Yet every nation and 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, 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 quasi-familial relationship with sports teams, or work colleagues, friends, or congregations, lodges, or drinking buddies. Only the familiar faces, voices and stories of the family, whoever they are, can give real comfort and security. Everyone else falls into the category of the unknown, and with the unknown, you never know.
Our own family is always the hardest to understand because it is 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.” So 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 dig at all. Instead, they tended to write from their emotional memories, producing either family horror stories of unbelievable nastiness or Norman Rockwell portraits of perfection. The first type was by far the most interesting and somewhat more believable.
Happy families are rather dull. Tolstoy said 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 any of the awful, bitter, vengeful families we meet in fiction. But we like to read about them. They make our own families seem just about perfect.
If they do seem just about perfect, it almost certainly means that we are missing something. Every family has its secrets and silences, and how intriguing they are. Some family secrets may be unraveled by inquisitive DNA testing or by an indiscreet uncle at the Thanksgiving table, but the family story always restores itself, like the plot of a classic novel.
But Thanksgiving is no time to indulge in idle curiosity. It is the one day in the year when we should listen carefully to our family stories and believe every single word.
