Book Review: Fiction Ruined My Family

For today’s Book Review Tuesday post, we are again visiting the land of the memoir. Fiction Ruined My Family was originally reviewed for LuxuryReading.com, which graciously provided my review copy free of charge. The original, condensed, review, which was posted December 19, is available here.

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Fiction Ruined My Family

I loved the premise of this book when I first saw it on the Luxury Reading book list: a memoir about a woman born and bred into the writing world. Fabulous, I thought, especially when I saw Darst’s sense of the absurd, her brilliance, and her “wickedly funny” prose touted in the main Amazon.com review.

Then I read it. Sigh, she said.

Jeanne Darst is the youngest daughter of the latest in a long line of writers and journalists on one side, and of old money on the other. Her father, attempting to find his own place in the family business of writing, dragged his family through what seems to me to be hell and back in his attempts to write the Great American Novel – without success. Jeanne’s mother was not so amused with this, as it meant she (and their four daughters) got hauled from location to location – and into increasingly dire financial straits – in the process. Not exactly the life she was used to, being as she came from St. Louis’ equivalent of royalty, replete with debutante balls, national equestrienne titles, and mansions…

As Jeanne and her sisters grow up, they witness startling contrasts between their grandparents’ lives and their own, and struggle to each decide how to deal with their father’s obsession (and concomitant alcoholism) and their mother’s depression (and concomitant alcoholism). Somewhere along the way, Jeanne decides she too is going to be a writer – and as different from her parents as possible – and her attempts to pave her own way in the literary world are full of their own flavors of bizarre-ity (yes, I made that word up) and adventure.

Given that set up, you’re imagining a story that is funny or witty or goofy or random (or some combination of those), right? I was too, at first. And I kept waiting for the moment when the story would deliver on one or more of those imaginings. It never did. Instead, what it just turned out to be was sad.

This is a poor little rich girl story about a poor little poor girl. It is full of tragedy largely unleavened by comedy. Despite all of the things Jeanne seemed to say she wanted to avoid, she spent much of her life spiraling into an amalgamation of her two parents. If ever there was a case to be made for the genetic components of alcoholism and depression, this is that case.

Now I know this is a memoir, not fiction. And I know people make choices in life that sometimes turn out to be bad and self-destructive and foolish. And I know that all people make such choices at some point. I have empathy for Jeanne’s childhood and the drama that her parents unfolded around her, and I do believe that there are people with predispositions (genetic or emotional or psychological or physical or whatever) toward addiction. I really do. So don’t think I’m slamming her for the decisions she made (or avoided). I’m not. I was fortunate enough to not have to deal with any of the types of struggles she did as a child, so I don’t know what I would have done in her shoes. I am, however, sorry to say that I didn’t enjoy reading about them.

If the book had been touted as the story of her struggle to overcome demons of one kind or another, I might have been able to give it a more positive review. (Actually, I wouldn’t, because then I wouldn’t have read it. I don’t generally choose to read those types of memoirs – I like to escape in my reading, not drown in it…) It wasn’t. It was presented as a story of the absurdity of life (which to my mind carries with it an assumption of some levity and light and possibility, not a series of unfortunate events tempered with even more unfortunate decisions), the bumps on the road to becoming a writer, and the ultimate triumph of the desire to write over the obsession of addiction.

That presentation appealed to me immensely. The actual story, however, not so much. Honestly, I struggled with every page I read. Darst’s writing style is fine, I just could not find any way to put myself in the shoes of 99% of the characters in the book, and that simply made it impossible for me to enjoy. Maybe that’s a product of my relatively privileged life – we never had buckets of money, but we always had more than enough food, clothes, and shelter, which are claims Jeanne couldn’t make – or maybe it’s just a product of my taste in stories. Either way, I am sorry to say that this book did not deliver on what I expected.