Family drama!

[muckefuck]

So Mom was on the local news tonight. They sent a cub reporter to trawl the hospital for people who had slipped on the ice and broken something, and guess who the lucky winner was! She was out walking the dog--my sister's dog, who came to live with Mom a week ago after biting one of my nephew's wee pals and won't go out the door without accompaniment--and broke her off wrist.

The doctor, incidentally, is the son of her older sister's obgyn. Her husband (affectionately known as "Uncle Heatmiser" to me and bunj) was banging the good doctor's wife at the time, and in one of her alcohol-fueled rages, my aunt drove over to their house, threw her husbands clothes into the driveway, and screamed, "IF YOU WANT HIM YOU CAN KEEP HIM!" "So, you knew my dad!" junior said when he came into check on my Mom and she muttered something vague about what the connexion was.

It wasn't all bad, though, because one of her younger sisters, who's recovering from stomach cancer, took her in and they had a fruitful heart-to-heart. Mom got to hear all about how her sister's second eldest--who moved all the way to Montana to get away from her--lit into her at Thanksgiving, basically blaming her for everything that didn't go right in her life. It was so bad that her other relatives wrote her to say that if she was planning on doing anything like that again at Christmastime, she should simply stay away.

The daughter did come in for Christmas, though she gave the family part a miss. So did we--and so did my Mom's next-youngest brother, who's never missed a year before in his life. Even when he was stationed in Germany, he flew in secretly as a special surprise for my grandparents. But a couple months ago, someone in the family company where he's worked all his life (no doubt the rat bastard second eldest of my mother's older brother) gave instructions to clean out his office without telling him, and a lot of personal stuff got thrown out in the process. Now for the lulz: They've been asking Mom if she can talk said brother into loosening his hold on the company stock he owns.

I remember remarking some weeks ago, after having completed García Márquez' memoirs and started on Allende's, how unfair it was that these Latin American authors just write down the stories of their unbelievably batshit families and get acclaimed as great authors for it. But there's a treasure trove amongst my own crazy families which I forget about because I've worked so hard to distance myself for it all.

Comments

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I don't know much of my family's drama because I'm a generation too young and my father was always wonderfully incurious about it (there's plenty, but nobody left alive to tell the tale). The main fund of stories on my wife's side is absolutely chock-full of weirdness, but he's 88 and regularly shushed by his wife and daughter whenever he "gets going." I think he's probably got a good 4-volume biography in him (present at assassination of Alexander Karađorđević, POW in Germany, partisan in Italy, occasional anthropological film-maker and inveterate gambler), but getting to the material is all but impossible.

It sounds like you have the ideal novelist's distance+information, and airing everyone's dirty laundry in public is a great way to stir up further craziness. Have you considered a regular series?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

If I were a Good Son, who called my mother more often, I'd be able to do regular installments.