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Augusten Burroughs meets Mary Karr: a deeply funny and wickedly
entertaining family memoir
The youngest of four daughters in an old, celebrated St. Louis
family of prominent journalists and politicians on one side,
debutantes and equestrians on the other, Jeanne Darst grew up
hearing stories of past grandeur. And the message she internalized
as a young girl was clear: While things might be a bit tight for us
right now, it's only temporary. Soon her father would sell the
Great American Novel and reclaim the family's former glory.
The Darsts uproot themselves and move from St. Louis to New York.
Jeanne's father writes one novel, and then another, which don't
find publishers. This, combined with her mother's burgeoning
alcoholism--nightly booze-fueled weepathons reminiscing about her
fancy childhood--lead to financial disaster and divorce. And as
Jeanne becomes an adult, she is horrified to discover that she is
not only a drinker like her mother, but a writer like her
father.
At first, and for years, she embraces both activities--living in
an apartment with no bathroom, stealing food from her babysitting
gigs, and raising rent money by riding the subway topless and
performing a one-woman show in her living room. Until gradually she
realizes that this life has not been thrust on her in some
handing-down-of-the-writing-mantle-way. She has chosen it; and
until she can stop putting drinking and writing ahead of everything
else, it's a questionable choice. "For a long time I was worried
about becoming my father," she writes. "Then I was worried about
becoming my mother. Now I was worried about becoming myself."
Ultimately, Darst sets out to discover whether a person can have
the writing without the ruin, whether it's possible to be both
sober and creative, ambitious and happy, a professional author and
a parent. Filled with brilliantly flawed, idiosyncratic characters
and punctuated by Darst's irreverent eye for absurdity, "Fiction
Ruined My Family" is a lovingly told, wickedly funny portrait of an
unconventional life.
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