As a memoir about a family and its demons Jeanne Darst’s Fiction Ruined My Family falls short. How can this be a book about a family if the reader knows practically nothing about these sisters and their tragic parents? Darst barely touches on her parent’s Southern origins and legacies. This makes it difficult to understand any of the sisters motivations. How can we understand where this family is going if we don’t know where they came from? Even the author’s own pregnancy is a marginal story in a book that devotes a chapter to the comical irony of having pubic lice during Christmas.
Instead, it is about the author’s battle with alcoholism and living underneath her father’s mythical and fading literary shadow; about how children trying to ensure they do not become their parents end up doing so anyway. Darst explores the tendency for artists to seek dysfunction and destruction in order to create, mistakenly thinking true art can only be born from madness. These themes are explored in less than twenty stories; stories that were best the first time you heard them at that party one night in Brooklyn. Darst is a good storyteller even if she isn’t telling the best story.
Further Reading: Smashed Koren Zailckas; Drinking: A Love Story Caroline Knapp. Wishful Drinking Carrie Fisher; Dry Augusten Burroughs
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