Happy families and unhappy families
Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina with one of the falsest first lines of literature; he writes that "happy families are all alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." With novels and memoirs full of dysfunctional families of perverse individuals, perhaps we are congratulating ourselves in our unhappiness that at least we are not like those boring happy folks. But perversion, being parasitical, is capable of only so many permutations. Every happy family has found its own way of creating an organic being from a few vagrant individuals.
"Dysfunctional family" must be a cliche by now. The "Books" section of The New York Times is probably the most boring part of the paper after "U.S. News." But I love invites to family dinners, to watch the members speak to, and listen to them speak of, one another, to see their different methods of life.
Last night, I listened to a wife talk about her husband's annual spring itch to drive to Washington and back, that it was past their young daughter's bedtime, but that she was being kept up until her daddy got home, and later on in the evening, when he did get home, happy with his adventure and happy to come home again, the way the wife listened to her husband's tired mumbles, the tiny stud in her nose glinting under the light, his tattooed knuckles folding and unfolding, stacking and unstacking, on the table, an almost visible current running between them. Once he was a hobo, now he has two children and a wife, and they live together in a home.
I read once that unhappiness is easier to write about, being universal, but that happiness is private, personal, individual, and thus more difficult to capture in a way that speaks broadly to the outside world.
"Dysfunctional family" must be a cliche by now. The "Books" section of The New York Times is probably the most boring part of the paper after "U.S. News." But I love invites to family dinners, to watch the members speak to, and listen to them speak of, one another, to see their different methods of life.
Last night, I listened to a wife talk about her husband's annual spring itch to drive to Washington and back, that it was past their young daughter's bedtime, but that she was being kept up until her daddy got home, and later on in the evening, when he did get home, happy with his adventure and happy to come home again, the way the wife listened to her husband's tired mumbles, the tiny stud in her nose glinting under the light, his tattooed knuckles folding and unfolding, stacking and unstacking, on the table, an almost visible current running between them. Once he was a hobo, now he has two children and a wife, and they live together in a home.
I read once that unhappiness is easier to write about, being universal, but that happiness is private, personal, individual, and thus more difficult to capture in a way that speaks broadly to the outside world.
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