How Much Family Is Too Much Family?

To talk to most mothers, mine and Sonia's included, there is no such thing as too much family. In my parents' rural American culture, they look forward to every four-hour meal, every one-year-old birthday party and every high school play.

It's easy to forget from the vantage point of my coastal elitism: most of America is built this way. Or at least, the rural and suburban part of America that is lucky enough to be moderately comfortable and middle class.

This weekend, I skipped out on some family events in favor of getting my head on straight for springtime, exercising and creating some new health and writing goals. I felt more relief than guilt, a true accomplishment for a veteran of 13 years of Catholic school.

My favorite cousin, a sweet 41-year-old man with two kids, was in town from Washington state. His little brother, a self-righteous Christian who is difficult to be around, came along too. Families and girlfriends stayed at home so Thursday night, Sonia and I had dinner with the two cousins on their way to my aunt's house.

They drove their rental car our house and we walked to a nearby gastropub. I apologized for and tried to explain city life. My favorite cousin recounted a story from when we were little.

"You had this little pink mirror with a handle," he said. "I looked into it and said, 'I'm in the mirror!' and handed it to you to prove it. 'No, I'm in the mirror!' you said. You were so confused. We went on that way for a long time."

"Did you try that with your daughter when she was that age?" I asked.

"Absolutely," he said. "It's a classic. You find a classic, you stick with it."

I can't explain my love for this cousin except that we were the two oldest, so right around the time I was starting to be aware of the world, he was there, five years older than me and awesome. He's also got a way of breaking the ice.

In another moment, we were explaining the structure of high schools in Philadelphia and Sonia's school pride came out, a little more aggressively than usual. I was worried that she sounded a little racist, which she is not.

"Honey," I said. "Watch it. You're sounding a little elitist."

The favorite cousin was quick on the draw. "You would be too," he said, "If you went to Central!"

It was great to see him. Even the Christian cousin and I tolerated each other, as he engaged us in stories about his new hobby: deep-water diving.

That was Thursday night. Saturday, we were invited to may aunt's for all-day conversations and meals. Tonight, about a dozen family members are doing the same thing at my parents' house. We declined both invitations.

It's true that Sonia and I are trying to say "yes" more often than we say "no" to family, but I live in the city for a more engaging job (which I love), for a chosen family (which we are building) and for the opportunity to write about where I come from (which requires distance).

Looking back on my past few blog posts, I feel like a pendulum. My boss and Sonia have a related observation about me that drives me nuts. They both claim that I can have very passionate, completely opposing views on a topic two days in a row. They're not wrong.

At work it looks like this:

• Monday: So-and-so isn't working hard at all. We should give them a warning because they're not meeting expectations. 
• Tuesday: The same person is amazing! They really stepped up today and it's so clear that they're putting in more of an effort. 

Both of these things can be true, but few people would make such a quick shift. I think it means I'm always open to being proven wrong. I want to believe in people. 

At home it looks like this: 

• Monday: I haven't heard from the cousins who are coming to visit, so we can skip seeing them this time. 
• Tuesday: I heard from them! We have to change all of our plans so we can see them in the three-hour window they gave me for a dinner together. 

When it comes to writing, this tendency leaves me a little schizophrenic-feeling. I want to write about family and belief and happiness, but my ideas about these topics are constantly shifting and internally contradictory. 

This blog is an opportunity to build a body of memior-style vignettes, to note themes as they evolve over time and to nail down a story about family that feels fresh enough to turn into a book. To do all that, sometimes requires a break from said family. 

How White People Write Race

The Doctorow book has me thinking about how I write race.

As a writer, it’s easier to see my black neighbor or the Coalhouse character as sympathetic humans than it is to see my own parents, with all of their ingrained prejudice and homophobia, as sympathetic humans. 

But that’s the easy way out, a temptation we have to resist as white writers, says W. Kamau Bell.

In an interview on With Friends Like These, he told white people to handle ourselves, calling out racism when we hear it and advocating for a new narrative of whiteness.

To participate in writing that future, I might have to understand where my parents are coming from.

The white supremacist is a familiar character, and it is not them. They deserve better. There isn’t a strong narrative of the “good white person,” racially speaking, but perhaps we can only get there by exploring all of the good intentions that lined our path to today.

The task becomes not writing black characters but trying to find empathy or insight in my parents' view of the world.

There is so much I want to say about our time that I felt ill-equipped to say, but surely the only white voices cannot be the bigoted ones. That's serving exactly no one.

Talking about whiteness, talking about blackness, talking about race in America is like talking to my parents about sex. There’s simply no good agreed-upon language for it. There are landmines everywhere.

I've ridden the wave into adulthood on the premise that the old white, Christian tale of America was simplistic and ignorant, the result of brainwashing or fear. Yet my parents are complex people.

Good intentions got us here. We’re going to need more bravery than good intentions to get us out.

The Not-gay Novel

Let Me Explain You by Annie Liontas is not a novel about being gay, and it's not a novel about how a Greek immigrant family comes to terms with their oldest daughter being gay. But it sort of is.

The main character is an egotist named Stavros Stavros, the father of three daughters, the owner of two restaurants, and the ex-husband of one woman, who announces in an email to his family in the opening chapter that he will die in ten days.

There's a lot going on in this novel. The novel takes a close third-person perspective that sometimes sits with Stavros; sometimes his oldest daughter and namesake, Stavroula; sometimes his ex-wife Dina; sometimes one of the other two daughters, each with their short list of working class struggles.

Because there is so much going on, and because I read this hoping for a little more lesbian action, I was particularly honed into the treatment of the lesbian character and oldest daughter.

In one of the first chapters, she rewrites the menu of her restaurant to honor July, the name of the coworker she has been pining after for years. It's awkward, and another 200+ pages go by before they find themselves in a late-night kitchen, with food as the metaphor for love and desire.

The possibility of an affair, one of the primary drivers of the book, ends without a kiss, unless you count Stavroula's "We just frenched," joke, uttered as they worked together to tie a rack of lamb. Let's just say the comic release of the book wasn't the kind of release I was hoping for.

I've been reading more first novels, imagining what mine will be, gathering courage from the idea that these writers toiled away for so long before finding a pathway and putting this first work into the world. I liked this one, and there's probably more for me to excavate in that father-daughter relationship than I'm ready to do right now.

But my novel will definitely be gayer.