Did You Ever Have a Family

Did You Ever Have A Family
By Bill Clegg
2015
Scout Press
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9817-2
Hardcover
Purchased that Joseph Beth on my Man-Booker Kick
Stamped and Keeping

So here's an embarrassing thing about me as a reader. I read all the time, but sometimes, I have trouble holding what I have read recently in my head. Often, if you ask me what I've read lately that's good, I will have a hard time coming up with something, not because I haven't read anything lately, or because none of it is good, but because I just don't remember. I do much better when I have visual reminders (I will never have trouble recommending something in a bookstore or standing before the bookshelves in my living room) but I can't always pull something out of my head to a general question about reading.

This fall, that was potentially a problem, because I listed reading as one of my hobbies on my residency application, which I knew would lead to people asking me about what I was reading or had read lately. The combination of my baseline interview nervousness and the fact that I sometimes draw a blank in response to that question even in the most casual of circumstances led me to decide that I needed a strategy.

The strategy I choose was the Man Booker Longlist which had just come out around the time that I started thinking in earnest about my impending residency application process. I figured this was a good strategy for two main reasons. (1) It gave me structure, such that when asked what I was reading lately, I could say something like, "Oh well, I've been reading books from the Man Booker Longlist." This would both give me a second and remind me what connected what I had been reading lately so that I would actually be able to come up with the titles. (2) The novels that make the longlist are generally pretty good books.

So I read A Little Life (breathtaking, gorgeous, the best book of 2015, and what I actually ended up talking about on most of my interviews when asked if I had read anything good lately), Satin Island (different, very interesting), The Illuminations (lovely, atmospheric), and A Brief History of Seven Killings (which I just didn't like. I know, I know, it won the whole shebang. I can see that it is an accomplishment, virtuosity and all that. I personally didn't enjoy reading it, and frankly, I read fiction for pleasure.)

So that is how I came to have Did You Ever Have A Family in the "To Read" pile. I suspended hardcover buying limitations, and grabbed up a number of the other books on the list as well (eventually, I hope to get through them all).

Did You Ever Have A Family is one of those books that it is difficult to say, clearly, what it is about. The event that the story centers around is a home gas explosion which leaves June, a former galley employee, the only survivor, killing her boyfriend, ex-husband, daughter and daughter's fiancee, on the morning of what was to be her daughters wedding day. We hear from multiple narrators, most prominently June herself, and Lydia, who is June's boyfriend's mother and June's good friend.

The theme running though the whole thing is loss, but loss seems such a little word for the enormity of what is presented here. The title is apt, because really, what I came away from this was with a sense of the beauty and pain of the emotional ties that make us families, both by blood and by choice. The book is filled with all kinds of families, and wrapped in each are love and anger, hope and loss, guilt and pride, blame and joy. It is to Clegg's credit that he can so finely craft some of these voices that only a single chapter can both push the story forward and show us, "yes, I did have a family, and it caused me both joy and sorrow."

So overall, this is beautiful. It's a small book, a relatively quick read, and well worth the effort. I'm keeping it forever, so if you want to borrow it, come visit.