Family Trouble: Memoirists on the Hazards and Rewards of Revealing Family by Joy Castro (review)

Renowned memoirist, scholar, and feminist bell hooks calls the “homeplace” a “site of resistance” and takes us with her as she visits her grandmother’s home in the South. In Family Trouble, twenty-five memoirists take us to their homeplaces, their birthplaces, their landings on the Great Plains, and temporary displacements there. Faith Adiele, in “Writing the Black Family Home,” for example, asks herself if her memoir would “break the heart of the Nigerian family that sheltered” her when her “blood father rejected” her. Though her memoir was published and was well received in circles that mattered to her, she says she still cries when she reads it, asking herself whom she has “betrayed” (87). Other memoirists in the collection ask themselves the same question as they explore their acts of resistance reflected in their stories. Those who are writing in the genre would benefit greatly from these authors’ self-questions, doubts, and concerns for others whose silences they have broken.

Susan Ito discovers that her birth mother, whose family relocated to the Midwest after World War II in an internment camp, was a member of the only Asian family for miles around. The author’s mother was approaching thirty when she “went underground and had a secret relationship” with a married man—the father of three who was “well known” and had stayed in touch with Ito’s birth mother over the years (115). A condition of the relationship with the birth mother was that Ito could not ask about or know the identity of the birth father and could not tell anyone that she was Ito’s birth mother. When Ito dared to broach the forbidden subjects “the result was an immediate freeze-out” (116) sometimes lasting as long as six years. How did the author cope with these interdictions? She wrote short fiction about a Japanese American girl interned in one of the ten camps established during World War II, and that story won a nomination for a Pushcart Prize and a cash award. It was a story woven together with just a few threads of truth told by her birth mother in a hotel room. The rest Ito imagined.

Like many other women, Ito writes about her mother’s life. Alice Walker says we are all “in search of our mothers’ gardens.” For those of us who were raised on the midwestern “homeplace” and have seen our mothers’ gardens, we are in an enviable position in that we can deconstruct and reconstruct the gardens—recalling the peonies carried to cemeteries in the Great Plains, the ragweed and thistle, the rosehips and wild plum thickets we passed on the garden paths. But Ito cannot do this—her mother’s is a secret garden, a garden Ito has never seen. Sandra Scofield also seems in search of her mother’s life, but her grandmother tells Scofield nothing of her mother or of the grandmother’s mother who died at age thirty. Rigoberto Gonzalez’s mother suffers a stroke at thirty, and her parents come from Mexico by bus to say their farewells. When his mother scribbles something across a page, the grandmother tells the dying woman she understands. Over the years, however, Gonzalez is puzzled by the different versions of the hospital scene, so he asks his grandmother again what his mother had written. In exasperation, the grandmother admits that she does not know and has carried that heavy load all these years. Being unable to read or write contributed to her pain and feeling of helplessness as her daughter lay dying, though no one could have deciphered the urgent message penned in those final moments.

Vietnamese American Bich Minh Nguyen says her father will not read her memoir but is eager to sell copies to others who might read it. Her sister says writing a memoir seems out of character for a Vietnamese woman, but it is the...