"Why Do I Love These People?": How families make it through tough times
My older brother once observed that the only normal happy families we knew were the ones we didn't know well.
After reading "Why Do I Love These People? Honest and Amazing Stories of Real Families" (Random House, 377 pp., $24.95), intimate portraits of 19 achingly real families by Po Bronson, I'm now convinced my brother was right: There's no such thing as a "normal" family.
As for "happy," as Bronson puts it, "painful and troubling things happen, even in great families ... What makes a family great has nothing to do with whether you live in the family-friendly suburbs, or whether the grandparents are still around, or whether there's never been a divorce ... In the end, I hope what these stories demonstrate is love. Not fakey romantic love ... Rather, how you get through life with the ones you love."
Normally, such touchy-feely assertions set off my pyschobabble alarm, but Bronson backs his amiable preaching with fascinating myth-busting statistics. Consider: A hundred years ago, a child had nearly the same chance of experiencing single parenthood as today. Consider: The majority of children have never lived in traditional families with a breadwinner dad and homemaker mom on their first and only marriage, not even in the '50s and '60s, the supposed golden age of families.
Which brings us to the book's heart and strength: riveting tales about families who have been through it.
There's a Romeo-and-Juliet romance in Northern Ireland between a Catholic butcher and a Protestant single mother who had three children from two fathers (the first a convicted murderer, the second a convicted batterer).
There's the boy growing up in a California ghetto who stuck to school and stayed out of gangs because he fantasized that his father, who'd been killed in the Nigerian Civil War, somehow magically returns to whisk him to their family palace in Africa.
There's the homemaker mom, who, restless after 10 years of "plain vanilla missionary-style monogamy" with an emotionally distant husband, asks his permission to have an affair. He reluctantly agrees. Does steamy side sex rekindle marital romance? (Of course not!) What saves the relationship is more subtle, more sustaining and too complex to fully explain here. (Intrigued? Read the book.)
"How do families that have experienced years of struggle make the transition to a better place?" writes Bronson. The answers are in the anecdotes.
To find 19 exemplar cases, Bronson interviewed 700 people about their families, immediately rejecting 500 because they were "still stuck in the river hole, with no indication of getting out soon." He picked 40 families, interviewed them an average of 10 hours each and corresponded with many for more than a year.
Talk about diversity. Chinese, Mexican American, Turkish, African American, Nigerian (Yoruba), Filipino (Ilocano), Northern Irish, Japanese, Indian (Tamil) and Black British (of Jamaican heritage). Southerners, Northerners, Midwesterners, urban and country.
Issues include teen pregnancy, drug use, affairs, poverty, natural disasters, single parenthood, mental illness, immigration, assimilation, distant fathers, absent mothers, abuse, adoption, forced marriage, marital boredom, unexplained death of a child.
Many stories have an element of the fantastic — an heirloom gold bracelet hidden in China that helps heal a rift between generations, for example. Yet Bronson skillfully highlights the universal emotions and dilemmas that haunt all family relationships.
Based in San Francisco (but with family ties in the Northwest), Bronson is divorced, remarried, a father, a novelist and author of The New York Times nonfiction best-seller "What Should I Do With My Life?"
His writing is easy to read in the same way Oprah is easy to watch. Unlike Studs Terkel, who let his subjects speak for themselves in rich gritty vernacular, these stories are all told in Bronson's smooth baby-boomer voice.
Even the quotes sound like Bronson. That's a disappointment. But I'll get over it. After all, one of the most important lessons Bronson's 19 families teach is to appreciate overall goodness and overlook small flaws.
Paula Bock is a writer for The Seattle Times' Pacific Northwest Magazine.
Po Bronson will read from "Why Do I Love These People? Honest and Amazing Stories of Real Families," 7 p.m. Tuesday, University Book Store, 4326 University Way N.E., Seattle; free (206-634-3400 or www.ubookstore.com).