I love crazy family novels

To paraphrase Tolstoy, all functional families are the same, but every dysfunctional family is crazy in a different way.  I love reading in general, novels in particular, and crazy family novels best of all.

Misery loves company, so perhaps that is why I enjoy reading about families who have a good wallow in weirdness.  This genre may be from many eras and cultures, but I tend to enjoy stories taking place in the good old here and now. 

The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen is my favorite.  The Lambert family is certifiable, but not so out there as to be unrealistic.  I loved The Condition by Jennifer Haigh, which attracted me because the title referred to a medical condition that affected one of the family's children (and by extension the rest of the family).  Any novel by Meg Wolitzer is going to have some zany family fun. The parents in The Position are sex therapists who write a best-selling marriage manual in the free-and-easy '70s.  You can imagine how their kids turn out.

Not a novel, but an incredible memoir of some way wacked-out parents is The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls.  Jeannette was one of four children who pretty much had to raise themselves because the parents, though creative and intelligent, refused to buy in to bourgeois society by having jobs or doing much of anything responsible.  The truth is truly stranger than fiction.

And compared to these characters, I'm not doing so badly after all.

A Little Background

Before we go much further, here's the quick rundown on where I've come from:

My dad was a psychiatrist.  People always used to ask me if I told my father all my problems.  I'd say, why yes, I tell him: "Dr. M., I hate my father."    In the "physician, heal thyself" department, my father suffered from bipolar disorder, or what we called manic depression at the time.  He was in the loony bin for about six weeks when I was 12.  My main concern was that my parents would divorce.  It was 1976, that was the deal in those days.

Dad died almost eight years ago.  Mom was a psychiatric nurse for a while, then became a nurse administrator and did some consulting before she retired.  She lives not too far from me, and after some years of tension we're starting to move back toward each other.  But of course, all my problems are her fault.

I have two kids.  The Boy will be 14 this month.  He has hydrocephalus and a host of strange social and emotional delays.  He is taking the medication commonly given for bipolar disorder and it seems to be helping him.  But his shrinks can't say for sure that he's bipolar.  It does, however, run in families.

The Girl is 10.  She is more or less "normal," but has some strange anxieties, like the fear of sleeping away from her own bed.  This makes vacations very trying, and it also makes the sweet respite of sleepovers at friends' and relatives' homes impossible.  She's in an anxiety group now, it hasn't helped much yet.

What's wrong with me, you may ask?  Too much to go into now.