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What makes a ‘good’ day for a dysfunctional family? A family made so, in large part, due to unresolved trauma, seeping over time into life-altering mental illness.
Betty and Greg Laramie made absolutely terrible parents, eventually forcing them to give up their daughter, Charlie, to foster care. With Betty now suffering from intermittently debilitating Alzheimer’s, the story begins when adult Charlie is summoned home to Lake Geneva, Washington to assist her father Greg — dumping her right in the middle of the emotionally abusive family she cut all ties with many long decades ago.
A family whose ‘good’ days may best now be identified, for Charlie, as those in which Betty no longer remembers her abusive past, including the existence of her painfully neglected daughter.
This is often a sad book, seeped in character-based nostalgia for an emotionally-pitted past, now laden with minefields and ‘could-have-beens’. As we meet young Betty (a beauty with a made-for-camera presence) and young Greg (an awkward and emotionally vulnerable ‘Tin-man’), in a timeline narrated in Greg’s first person voice from long ago, the author gradually peels away the couple’s past, letting the reader in on the long and winding arm of a number of terrible truths.
Between these pages we also will peel apart Charlie, through her present-day first-person voice, at forty-six years old and still struggling to understand a childhood she has mostly kept secret from her currently estranged husband, Ian, along with her nineteen year old daughter Olivia. Pushing to finally break down barriers to her understanding, Charlie’s now unavoidable quest may very well be her final undoing, as she faces down her co-defendant father, as well as her on-again off-again dementia-addled mother.
An interesting interplay of present and past, this is a good read, an evocative one, and a reminder that every sadness has its own back-story, — one that can be unpacked, internalized, and even, perhaps, amended.
A great big thank you to Netgalley, the author and the publisher for an ARC of this book. All thoughts presented are my own.
