family-relationships

There are all sorts of families," Tom's grandmother had remarked, and over the following few weeks Tom became part of the Casson family, as Micheal and Sarah and Derek-from-the-camp had done before him.He immediately discovered that being a member of the family was very different from being a welcome friend. If you were a Casson family member, for example, and Eve drifted in from the shed asking, "Food? Any ideas? Or shall we not bother?" then you either joined in the search of the kitchen cupboards or counted the money in the housekeeping jam jar and calculated how many pizzas you could afford. Also, if you were a family member you took care of Rose, helped with homework (Saffron and Sarah were very strict about homework), unloaded the washing machine, learned to fold up Sarah's wheelchair, hunted for car keys, and kept up the hopeful theory that in the event of a crisis Bill Casson would disengage himself from his artistic life in London and rush home to help.

To a child love is spelled T-I-M-E.

You are the posterity of your family. You are either continuing the progression or regression of your ancestors.

The greatest crime ever created is caring and loving.

So at family gatherings_ I try to stick to the acceptable script. Indeed, I discover that the less I say, the happier everyone seems to be with me. I sometimes wonder if I wouldn__ have been better off as a paraplegic or afflicted by some tragic form of cancer. The invisibility and periodicity of my disorder, along with how often I border on normalcy, allows them to evade my need for their understanding. And because our most enduring family heirloom is avoidance and denial of pain and suffering, I don__ need much prompting to shut myself down in their presence.

I believe a family can be like that sports team. A successful family wins as a team. But if its members are intent upon winning their own individual battles with one another, the team loses. A winning solution is to work out the differences and, when it__ over, let it be over. Then they can get back in the game as a team.

When you divorce someone, you divorce their whole family, Madeline had told her once.

She must ask; she must heal, and if she couldn__ heal, she must suffer, but if there was a chance, she must take it.

I consider you mine, because Donna considered you hers.

There's only three things you need to do when you are finished editing your book - Sleep! Sleep! and Sleep!

...it isn__ things and proximity, or even blood that holds us all together. What makes a family is love and loyalty.

Seed becomes tree, son becomes stranger.

There are millions of people out there who live this way, and their hearts are breaking just like mine. It__ okay to say, __y kid is a drug addict or alcoholic, and I still love them and I__ still proud of them._ Hold your head up and have a cappuccino. Take a trip. Hang your Christmas lights and hide colored eggs. Cry, laugh, then take a nap. And when we all get to the end of the road, I__ going to write a story that__ so happy it__ going to make your liver explode. It__ going to be a great day.

This is how it essentially is for Bunny Junior. He loves his dad. He thinks there is no dad better, cleverer, or more capable, and he stands there beside him with a sense of pride _ he's my dad _ and he also, of course, stands beside him because he has nowhere else to go.

...our family became a place where you screamed for help but no one heard, not ever.

Do I raise the dead when I put him behind bars? Then what'll I do it for? We used to shoot a man who acted like a dog, but honor was real there, you were protecting something. But here? This is the land of the great big dogs, you don't love a man here, you eat him!

Bad luck doesn't have any chinks in it. I was born a son of a bitch and I'm going to die a son of a bitch. - Captain Roque Carnicero

This book is a personal memoir; but it is also a larger story-about carelessness and guilt, and the wreckage they can make of lives.