dysfunctional family

Blood From A Stone (1/22/2011)

brittany — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

New York, New York

Tommy Nohilly’s first play, Blood From A Stone, treads the familiar terrain of family dysfunction, zeroing in on the return of oldest son Travis [played with anguished complexity by Ethan Hawke] to the family’s ramshackle Connecticut home. What exactly ails this prodigal child is a mystery. We know that he is jobless, broke, single, and addicted to pain killers, but the demons that hover near him are never fully revealed. At first, the reasons he’s returned home are also unclear. Is he looking for solace? Hoping for a financial handout? Or does he truly want to see his parents and siblings?

As the play opens, Travis is in the living room schmoozing with his bedraggled mom [Ann Dowd] about the many problems besetting their nearest and dearest. They’re clearly comfortable with one another and as they fold laundry, we learn that Travis’ visit is intended to be a short stopover before he drives cross-country “to start over.” First, however, this eldest son intends to help his baby brother [played with a perfect blend of surface bravado and emotional terror by Thomas Guiry], a gambling addict now heavily in debt and in the throes of a marital break-up. Travis also makes clear that he’s in need of quality time with his mom, dad, sister [Natasha Lyonne], and former girlfriend [Daphne Rubin-Vega], a now-married mom.

Crisis after crisis looms. While there is some humor throughout the play, the shouting, stomping, and cursing that are this family’s M.O. make it hard to watch. Worse, Blood From A Stone says nothing new about the dynamics that simultaneously cleave people apart and hold them together. Indeed, while there is ample affection between the siblings and between each of the kids and their parents, why mother Margaret and father Bill [an apoplectic, continuously-raging Bill Clapp] have stayed together for umpteen years is anybody’s guess. In fact, their non-stop exchanges of vitriol are perplexing and awful.

The tension in the home is stomach churning, and one gets the sense that this is because of both political differences and family history. At one point Bill unleashes a racist rant, telling Travis that the U.S should turn Baghdad into “a fucking parking lot.” He verbally assails Osama Bin Laden, and while his comments elucidate his character, they do nothing to shed light on the tortured dance he, his wife, and kids have been doing for eons. Instead, the audience is privy only to his taunts, tirades, and violent outbursts. At the same time, Margaret’s proves that she is capable of giving as good as she gets, but to what end?

By the two-act play’s denouement, the audience has seen brilliant acting, a fantastic set evoking homey decrepitude, and a lot of fury, which, in a phrase, signifies nothing. It’s disappointing, to say the least.

In the end, Blood From A Stone confirms what we probably already knew, that love is not enough to quell deeply held hostilities or repair broken relationships. What’s more, it attests to the fact that the way family members interact needs to change before new ways of being can take root. Sadly, no one in Nohilly’s play seems ready to make that leap.

Blood From A Stone runs through February 5. Tickets are $60 and can be ordered by calling 212.239.6200 or going to TheNewGroup.org. The play is being performed at The Acorn Theater, 410 West 42 Street, New York, NY 10036.

Photo credit: Monique Carboni

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, January 24th 2011

Freedom

brittany — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 08:00:00 +0000

By Jonathan Franzen

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Brittany: I’m one of those lit geeks who has long loved Jonathan Franzen. I read How To Be Alone on a solo trip to Japan when I was twenty, and it particularly spoke to me as an introverted writer. The better part of a decade later, I’m still so infatuated with that particular collection—though I’ve also read Franzen’s three previous novels, memoir, numerous pieces in The New Yorker, and his longtime partner Kathryn Chetkovich’s Granta essay “Envy” before it was so publicly associated with Franzen—that it was no stretch to know I’d like Freedom. I’ve also read a lot about Franzen’s process as a writer, and frankly, it seems few people have the commitment to churn out the type of work he produces. That doesn’t mean I think it’s above critique; it’s just that I admire his work ethic and generally, the end result.

Mandy: Given that I frequently read The New York Times Book Review and listen to pop culture pundits on NPR, I’m quite familiar with Franzen’s status as a literary darling; however, I had never read his work until Freedom. This past July, I listened to a compelling New Yorker podcast in which Franzen discussed the prevalence of songbird killings for food in the Mediterranean, and I decided it was time I join the ranks and give this guy a shot. When Freedom was released, I dutifully attempted to avoid its reviews, so as to not taint my experience of the nearly 600-page tome. But that effort yielded little success; once the media got a hold of the book, glowing reviews were ubiquitous, and thus my hopes were high.

Brittany: Freedom ended up being much of what I expected, and months after putting it back on the shelf, I’m still relatively satisfied with the long nights it took me to finish it off. Five main characters (six if you count the underdeveloped daughter) weave in and out of one another’s lives, most tragically and painfully, and nearly all of them are deeply flawed, rather screwed up people.

For reasons I still haven’t quite figured out, I identified both with philandering tortured artist Richard Katz and college athlete cum miserable housewife Patty Berglund. In part, I think this is because Franzen has gotten rather good at not overstating who his characters are, allowing readers to put a bit of our own experience onto the story of each key player. That said, as is nearly always the case when a critic loves a mainstream work, I like to pretend that the reflection I seek in this sort of fiction isn’t shared by anyone else. I don’t want to think about who else identifies with a woman like Patty, because in the end, while I might have felt for her, having sympathy for her character is also very much a statement of how I see myself opposed to her. I’m not a miserable housewife, nor am I an adulterer (even if I do sometimes act like a tormented creative type). Being able to both identify as something and not as something both hold value for me; in this case, simultaneously.

Without giving too much away, I think the book is about having compassion, and I suspect that I liked it because I tried to have a lot of it for all of the characters. Except for Joey Berglund. I think he has a personality disorder.

Mandy: While I understand why Franzen is being showered with praise, I was pretty disappointed in Freedom. To my mind, fiction should facilitate a temporary transportation into the world the author has created, and my main criticism of Freedom is that I was entirely aware through the duration of the book that a) I was reading, b) I was reading something someone made up, and c) I was experiencing characters through the lens of the author (read: they didn't come off as authentic selves). It also was clear to me that Franzen himself really identifies with Walter Berglund; therefore all the characters felt like they were presented through Walter's point of view, even when they were in first person narration.

Many critics have lauded Franzen for having the ability to write realistically from a woman’s perspective, a notion that itches my anti-essentialist thinking and one with which I don’t entirely agree. Even though most of Freedom is written is from Patty's perspective, the novel really revolves around her husband, Walter. For that reason, it makes sense that Franzen chose to write a lot of Patty's self-reflection in third person, particularly since one can argue that women’s lives tend to revolve around men’s (instead of their being agents of self-determination), a viewpoint to which I give some credence. But the question is one of intentionality on the part of the author, and I don't think Franzen was ever really able to get inside Patty’s character in a way where she enveloped him; it was always the other way around, with Walter being the focal point. The same is true for Richard Katz, the two kids, and Lalitha. In fact, the only character I even slightly identified with—and believe me, it was only slight—was Jessica. But she barely got any face-time, and may have been the least developed of all the characters.

It probably didn't help Franzen’s case that I recently read Zadie Smith's On Beauty, a novel which is thematically similar to Freedom (in that it also has a filial cast of rather unlikable characters who represent middle class liberal America’s hypocrisies and idiosyncrasies) that also had the benefit of an immensely skilled author whose linguistic craftsmanship and character development outshines Franzen’s, in my humble opinion. Smith’s characters are messy and lack self-awareness or self-control that might prevent their ample mistakes while Franzen’s characters see the forest for the trees and still insist on bumbles. In that light, On Beauty contained happy and unhappy surprises that felt genuine. With Freedom, I had the jump on the trajectory of each storyline from beginning to end, and the failure of the writing itself to captivate had me using the strength of self-persuasion to avoid skipping pages. In short, enjoying Freedom required too much effort for my liking.

Brittany: The last two pages of the book were simply magical for me and made the whole thing worth it because I'm not good enough yet at predicting endings to have seen any of that coming. I tend to think ninety percent of fictional or fictionalized stories—films, books—end horribly, and this didn't. I may like to think I’m above a happy ending, that I can somehow stomach that life so rarely grants them, but for me personally right now, I was just sort of relieved that even made-up people could have one.

Written by: Mandy Van Deven, Brittany Shoot, January 6th 2011

Spooner

andrea — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 20:00:00 +0000

By Pete Dexter

Grand Central Publishing

Warren Spooner is an underachiever in a remarkable family. As a child, he sneaks around town peeing in people’s shoes and watching things burn in the city incinerator. As an adult, he first becomes a major league baseball player and then a writer, seemingly destined for early demise as he eagerly enters into questionable situations with his boxer pal Stanley Faint. After a string of surgeries, he has enough metal in his body to warrant concern about the weight of his coffin when he eventually dies. There has never been a lovable black sheep quite like Spooner.

His step-father Calmer, a quiet, contemplative ex-naval commander turned teacher, is a constant source of support as Spooner gets older but doesn’t quite grow up. Graciously married to Spooner’s long-suffering mother Lilly, Calmer dutifully arrives in the principal’s office, in Spooner’s hospital room, and eventually spends his dying days defending his adoptive son’s property and sanity in ways perhaps forever unknown to the then-middle aged family man. If Spooner is on an epic journey that spans five decades of difficulty, unemployment, heartbreak, and redemption, then Calmer is his near-constant companion, even when they’re separated by distance and time. The depth of their emotional journeys and the lengths taken to save one another are impossible to sum up in a review of any length.

With a reading group guide included, Spooner is clearly more popular than I realized. It’s no surprise; I happily and confidently place it on a list of the best books of the naughts. A riotously funny, deeply moving instant classic, it will be given as a gift to more than one angsty pal with the hope that Spooner and Calmer’s respective stories of confusion and eventual redemption will resonate in the myriad ways they did for me. Most compelling of all are the similarities between Spooner’s experiences and that of National Book Award-winning author Pete Dexter. My suggestion is to read the book before you research Dexter; otherwise, much will be prematurely revealed.

If you empathize with issues related to family dysfunction, young adult angst, unspoken affection between male family members, and an inability to ever fully mature into a socially functional grown-up, you should not miss this epic journey.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, January 5th 2011

Elegies for the Brokenhearted

admin — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 16:01:00 +0000

By Christie Hodgen

W.W. Norton

Elegies for the Brokenhearted is a book about nobodies. The narrator, Mary Murphy, is a silent observer to the destructive forces around her that ultimately shape the outcome of her life. As invisible as her ubiquitous name, Mary is a shy—and at times optionally mute—child and young adult who finds very little to care for. We first meet Mary as a young girl trying desperately to gain the (positive) attention of her mother and uncle. As the reader learns more of these relationships, often one-sided with a young, vulnerable, Mary left aching for more, we understand why her emotions calcify at such a young age.

As silent as she may be to the other people in her life, as a narrator she is bitingly, viscerally descriptive, and engaging, and I found myself completely immersed in her world; always fighting for her despite her many shortcomings. The prose in this novel is engrossing and her world became very real to me, despite the overwhelmingly bleak, disappointing theme.

If the majority of the book was engrossing, the end left much to be desired. Mary, who had never found inspiration in anything—music, reading, working, even eating and talking—suddenly became a wonderful teacher of underprivileged youth and an effortless mother. The most destructive and formative relationships in her life, with her mother and sister, are terminated without closure, and she seems to heal from them effortlessly right in time for the last pages of the book. The reader had already come to accept Mary despite some loose ends; it would have been nice to see a more realistic, albeit less pretty, ending to the story.

This is not the cheeriest book you will read this summer, but the protagonist is a nobody that everybody will root for.

Written by: Colleen Hodgetts, June 19th 2010

The Truth About Delilah Blue

admin — Sun, 16 May 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Tish Cohen

Harper Perennial

After first reading The Truth About Delilah Blue's jacket blurb, it struck me as a beach book. It turned out I was only slightly incorrect; it's an airplane book, most satisfying when you really have nothing else to do and nowhere else to go.

Delilah, also known as Lila, is working as a nude model in an attempt to absorb the art education she cannot afford. Her father, a successful salesman who has long been the center of her world, now seems to be having trouble navigating the world on his own. It is at this point that Lila's long-lost mother reenters the scene, bringing a little sister and a family secret, both of which cause Lila to reexamine her viewpoint and direction in life.

The story’s center is a question: how do you solve a mystery that explains your entire life when one parent is too self-absorbed to recognize her part in the story, and the other parent is losing the part of his mind that remembers? Is it more important to go back or to go forward?

The Truth About Delilah Blue is well written, with an almost soothing narrative voice and descriptive prose that allows one to forgive the formulaic plot. Recipe for a summer’s read: Mix one plucky heroine with a family crisis, add a plot twist that no one will expect, sprinkle in a few quirky extras, and let combine for a hundred pages or so, more or less according to taste. Our heroine conquers her issues, shows them all, and lands the hot boyfriend just as she should, and voila, everybody’s fine. The story would have been sufficiently likable if it hadn’t tried to be more than it is, but unfortunately that’s not the case here. This book appears to be convinced it is a novel, not just a shortcut to a screenplay, but we have too many loose story threads, too many characters that enter with detail but drift off without explanation. Many concepts are touched on but none are done justice, from the pain of abandoned children to the sadness of a parent with Alzheimer’s and the anger at a parent that just won’t grow up. Any of these could have made for a successful story, several or all of them together if handled correctly and with enough detail. Unfortunately, Cohen sprinkles in only a little of each, and just ends up with soup.

The book is slow to start, and is most interesting in the middle third. The ending really isn’t one; only the father’s character sees resolution, while the others are left adrift in a sea of what ifs. Lila makes plans to be the one to gather up and hold together the loose ends of her family, and you expect to see how she manages the feat. Instead, the story just stops.

The Truth About Delilah Blue is enjoyable if you enter with little in the way of expectation. It’s just the thing to pick up before your next flight.

Written by: Melissa Ruiz, May 16th 2010

Little Venus

admin — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:00:00 +0000

By Carla Drysdale

Tightrope Books

Little Venus, a collection of poems by Carla Drysdale, is at once hauntingly beautiful and disturbing. The poems are an autobiographical account of child abuse, sexual abuse, and a dysfunctional family, yet Drysdale manages to strike the difficult balance between beauty and horror. As her first published book of poetry, this is an impressive debut.

Last month I reviewed Sharon Doubiago’s memoir, My Father’s Love: Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl, which confronted similar topics. Both women use the medium of poetry to work through lingering and confusing feelings of pain, betrayal, and love. While Doubiago fleshes out the details of her abuse, Drysdale weaves a portrait through short verse poems.

While many of the poems talk about her father, there are a few poems that address the refuges in Drysdale’s life. I find “New Years Eve at the Artist’s Colony” particularly moving, as Drysdale recounts the solidarity a musician creates:

He played for us—the dreamers, creators, eccentrics, the driven, the insecure, the arrogant, the labeled and unlabeled, the disowned and owned again.

I was drawn to this poem because it establishes how the experience of music, like poetry, can bring together those alienated by society. It also offers an opportunity for love and for the body to be positive. While many of the poems about her father emphasize the imposing and frightening body, in “New Years Eve” the body becomes a sensual vehicle for the music. The body is not always violent.

The truth is that these are difficult and challenging poems, reminiscent of such established poets as Lucille Clifton, Janice Mirikitani, and Doubiago. I cannot say that I enjoy these poems, as they make me uncomfortable and sad. But I would not read Little Venus for enjoyment. Rather, I would read it to recognize Drysdale’s honesty and poetic voice. These are poems like open wounds, seeking to heal and be healed.

Review by Claire Burrows

Written by: Claire Burrows, March 4th 2010

Tell Me Something True

admin — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 01:00:00 +0000

By Leila Cobo

Grand Central Publishing

Tell Me Something True is about a young woman, Gabriella, who spends a summer visiting family in Colombia and what she learns about her mother, Helena, upon discovering her diary. Helena died when Gabriella was only a baby, so the image Gabriella has of her mother is broken when she is confronted by the secrets her mother kept. Meanwhile, she is dealing with her own life and the complications that arise as she develops a relationship with the son of a drug lord.

After reading the first few chapters, I thought I was going to hate it because it seemed too predictable. But as I kept reading, I felt myself drawn in by the lives of these two women and ended up really liking the book. Despite its predictability (which I found problematic throughout the entire book), it was the development of the characters that I enjoyed. I felt there was a lot about both Gabriella and Helena that I could relate to. As a Latina growing up in the U.S., I struggled with fitting in, balancing independence and obedience, managing expectations, visiting family abroad, etc., and I think a lot of that was captured very well in this book. Of course, these struggles aren’t exclusive to Latinas, and I think there is something for everyone to connect with as they read.

The structure of the novel is one of the things I liked most about it. Each chapter switches back and forth between Gabriella’s experiences in the present, written in the third person, and entries from Helena’s diary, written in the first person. Because the diary entries are moving forward in time (for the most part, anyway), there is an anticipation that comes with each entry as the reader waits to know the whole story. I like novels that jump through time and shift narrators, so in some ways I was the ideal reader. Those who find such narratives frustrating might have a hard time connecting to the story.

Based on the reviews I’ve read, another complaint people have about this book is that they don’t like the ending. There isn’t much I can say without giving it away, but I will say that in many ways the ending made me connect with Gabriella’s character even more. In my opinion, it was a more realistic ending rather than the typical storybook ending. There are also some questions left unanswered about other characters, so there isn’t the sense of closure that people expect. Personally, I don’t mind not knowing, but I can certainly see why others would feel let down by the ending.

So if you like books with traditional narratives and happy endings, you probably shouldn’t pick this one up. But if those things aren’t particularly important to you, this book might be a pleasant surprise, even with its predictability. At its core, this novel is a coming of age story with a couple of twists. It’s also about relationships – the ones that fall apart unexpectedly, and the ones that strengthen under unlikely circumstances.

Written by: frau sally benz, January 24th 2010

My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike

admin — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 22:10:00 +0000

By Joyce Carol Oates

Harper Collins

My Sister, My Love is Joyce Carol Oates’ thirty-fifth novel in forty-five years. Ambitious and sweeping, the nearly 600-page tome explores a plethora of themes: the tabloid press’ obsession with celebrity; marital discord and fidelity; the pressure placed on children by achievement-worshipping parents; forgiving transgressions; the medicalization of normal human development; and the hypocrisy underlying Christian-inspired capitalism, among them.

The story is narrated by Skylar Rampike, a depressed nineteen-year-old whose six-year-old sister, Bliss, was brutally murdered ten years earlier. Bliss, a child-prodigy figure skater, was found in the family’s Fair Lawn, New Jersey home, hanging in the basement boiler room during the Christmas season of 1994. If it sounds familiar, it should. Like a Law and Order episode spun from a lurid news story, My Sister, My Love is a send up of JonBenet Ramsey and her family.

And what a family it is. Betsey is a hover mother of the highest order, hell-bent on making little Bliss a star. It starts serendipitously, when Bliss exhibits an uncanny dexterity that sends her mom into a what-if frenzy. First comes the name change; Bliss’ original name was Edna Louise, after her paternal grandmother, but she was re-christened "Bliss" after Betsey envisioned god instructing her to make the switch. This is followed by hormone injections into Bliss’ child-sized body, regular beauty makeovers to enhance the child’s appearance, and forced practice sessions, even when Bliss is in obvious pain from one or another injury.

While Betsey is over-involved and continually scheming for a place in the spotlight, the family patriarch is the opposite. Named Bix, he is an anti-Semitic womanizer, a politically conservative glad-hander who reveres money and status and is more than happy to keep his family at arm’s length. For his part, Skylar is everything his parents despise, a bookish, non-athletic kid with few friends.

It’s a recipe for trouble and the novel delivers it, in spades. Unfortunately, while there are moments in which the book is affecting, most of the time it falls flat. Among the problems is tone. At times, Skylar is extremely sympathetic—clearly grieving for his sister, tormented by survivor guilt, and filled with fury toward parents who push him out of sight because they are embarrassed by his anti-social mien. At other times, however, the narrator’s snarky voice is distracting. Oates may be trying to replicate the moods of a sullen teen, but like time in the company of a snotty boy-child, one wants to escape him rather than stay in his orbit. What’s more, the many tangents—including hundreds of footnotes meant to elucidate Skylar’s thought processes and intellectual pursuits for the reader—are annoying digressions that make the book longer and more detailed than it needs to be.

Oates is clearly making fun of upper class pretensions and the faux Christian piety and family values endemic to suburban Republicans. It’s a rich playing field, but sadly, My Sister, My Love_ reads like a bloated lecture delivered by a pompous windbag. It’s too bad because real life dramas can be wonderful jumping off points for imagined scenarios. What we get instead is as nauseating as the incessant coverage of celebrity shenanigans we’re continually fed, and we close My Sister, My Love_ feeling no more insight than we had when we picked up the novel for the very first time. It’s a huge disappointment from so gifted a scribe.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, July 26th 2009

Decision and Destiny

admin — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 08:59:00 +0000

By DeVa Gantt

First Avon Publishing

Decision and Destiny is the second novel in a three part series about the Duvoisin family of Charmantes Island. In this breathy period piece, we pick up the tale of the troubled Duvoisin family and their faithful governess, Chairmaine, after the death of matriarch Colette.

The patriarch of the family, Frederic, is a recluse who seldom interacts with his three youngest children, Pierre, Yvette, and Jeanette, and spends nearly all of his time in a private study. His new wife, Agatha, is an ogre of a woman who seems to hate the children and is the sister of his first wife, Elizabeth. Then there are Frederic’s two older children, sons bore before the lady Colette was even a factor in the drama. Paul is the prodigal yet illegitimate son who heads the family farming and shipping business while John is the estranged heir who shows up unexpectedly to re-ignite the hidden mystery of the family in Decision and Destiny. At the core of this tale we find the lovely Chairmaine with her complete dedication to the children and her blossoming attraction to both elder sons of Frederic.

Yes, the Duvoisin family is this complicated, and we learn even more so as the intricate tale unfolds. Familial complexities are central to the storyline as exampled in the seething fury that exists in the dynamic between father and son, Frederic and John, as well as the fierce competition between brothers John and Paul. There is a definite triangle of frustration in the interactions between the three men as John attempts to find his place within the family without really having to hold a role, and Frederic largely withholds himself from everyone. John guards his independence from his father’s fortune with passion while Paul, ever the workhorse for the family business, remains second in line despite his dedication.

For his part, Frederic’s anger with John is largely rooted in the death of John’s mother, Elizabeth, on the birth-bed some twenty-nine years prior. While knowing that his seething blame towards John is unfair, Frederic cannot help himself from continuously directing responsibility to the poor boy. It is made clear throughout this novel that Frederic withheld much affection from John as a result of his own heartache at the death of his first beloved wife. As the story unfolds, we learn that there is an even stickier layer to the current furies between father and son.

This novel is the collaborative effort of sisters Debra and Valerie Gantt—DeVa Gantt their writer’s pseudonym. These two women planted the seed of the Duvoisin family nearly three decades ago when they began to write this story in the late ‘70s. However, as it is wont to do, life intercepted their time and the novel was put down for twenty years. In 2002, the sisters decided to pick the story back up and the trilogy’s first novel, A Silent Ocean Away, was finally finished.

Reading the first installment could undoubtedly invest a reader in the family, but Decision and Destiny is able to stand on its own as a complete tale of love, despair, and unfolding mystery. While no groundbreaking literary feat, this novel is an entertaining read that is a good investment of ones’ time for the hammock on a hot summer day or the sofa on a cozy winter’s night.

Written by: Djuna A. Davidson, July 5th 2009

Must Read After My Death

admin — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 17:12:00 +0000

Directed by Morgan Dews

Familial dysfunction is rarely poetic, but archival footage can be visually stunning, especially paired with painfully honest audio recordings of diaries, intimate correspondence, and therapy sessions. After his grandmother Allis’ death in 2001, filmmaker Morgan Dews stumbled upon more than 200 home movies and fifty hours of tape-recorded diaries and Dictaphone correspondence which revealed a complicated story previously unknown to Dews. Until his discovery, despite his close relationship with his grandmother, Dews had no detailed knowledge of his grandparents’ fitful years together and the damage it caused his mother and uncles.

Allis and Charley’s union was unique for their time. After meeting in the 1940's while married to other people, they decided to have an open marriage, complicated further by Charley’s frequent and extended work-related travel, alcoholism, and stronger penchant for affairs than his wife. Allis, who had previously lived in Europe, began staying home in Connecticut to raise the children. The couple had their share of peculiarly imbalanced disagreements—Allis wished Charley would restrict his affairs to unpaid women, while Charley berated Allis for not keeping a tidier, more organized house—and at one point, physical violence erupted in front of the children. Looking for help navigating their unconventional marriage and the ways their idiosyncrasies affect their children, Allis and Charley hauled their family into psychotherapy in the mid-1960's.

A surprisingly feminist film, it quickly becomes obvious how much of the family’s suffering is unfairly attributed to Allis’ supposed shortcomings. Various psychotherapists repeatedly tell her to be more submissive, but not to abandon the family because while she is supposedly the one at fault, the family needs a mother figure. She is alternately praised for giving her children freedom while mothering them too much. These contradictory assessments create immense guilt for Allis, whose self-blame and sadness nearly engulfs her at times. She goes between wishing she could take the children somewhere remote to raise them alone and wanting to end it all—literally. Throughout the course of the film, narrated almost entirely by recordings of Allis’ innermost feelings, it is possible to hear her sanity slowly devolving.

Must Read After My Death is also often an indictment against the harmful early days of experimental psychiatry. Allis’ brutal doctors blame her for “damaging the whole family.” Much of the family’s communication ends up being filtered through doctors and therapists, and eventually, one son is institutionalized for unsubstantial reasons. Perhaps most revealing, after Charley suddenly passes away, the family abruptly ends all therapy and treatment. Allis’ subsequent silence, which lasts until after her own death, speaks volumes about her desire to bury the agony and trauma of those years.

At times reminiscent of Capturing the Friedmans for its intimate view into the personal lives of other families’ disturbing secrets, this film is captivating, depressing, and hauntingly voyeuristic.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, March 15th 2009