Maybe fiction ruined her memoir

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This article was published 17/12/2011 (5390 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Fiction Ruined My Family

By Jeanne Darst

Riverhead Books, 303 pages, $30

This irritating autobiography is a blow-by-blow of a 30-something American woman’s life as she struggles with her parents’ wreckage — a writing-obsessed dad who couldn’t get his novels published and support the family, and a mother mourning the fall from her wealthy St. Louis family life.

Mom drinks and has nightly “weepathons” with no career of her own. Ironically, out of all the kids in the family, author Jeanne Darst ends up a writer like her dad and an alcoholic like her mom — the people who upset and disappointed her most.

There are several annoyance aspects of this memoir, which, truth be told, has done well in U.S. literary circles. First, the title is off. The book might have been called Fiction Ruined My Parents’ Life, but it didn’t wreck her siblings’ lives, and Darst is doing all right herself as an actress and writer now that she’s sober.

Fiction may have made her family end up poor, and the kids and wife to feel secondary to dad’s writing obsession. But her nutty dad had all kinds of time for the Darst kids and wildly encourages Darst’s writing.

Her drinking mother loved her, too, though she wasn’t any help as a regular mom and role model. The family’s road to significant financial ruin probably started when Darst was 13, around the time their dad uprooted them from St. Louis to go to the New York area, where his genius was sure to flower.

Years later, getting help from Alcoholics Anonymous was a big turnaround for Darst, and meeting a supportive guy with a successful business enabled her to have a baby and some security.

But it put her on the West Coast in Los Angeles, while she feels homesick for her New York friends, family and culture. By the end of the memoir, her marriage has ended, but she’s sober, a happy mom and published.

She points out she has enough money to get two teeth replaced, not a small thing to her.

Near the end of the book she meets with her dad, who is totally obsessed with his research into the tragic life of Zelda Fitzgerald, the wife of the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Dad had lost a front tooth and had “a Dickensian appearance.” He’s too broke and/or oblivious to do anything about having one jagged tooth in front.

Darst is several rungs above those poverty days herself now and has learned you don’t need to be dirt poor and suffer to be a writer.

But this is not a revelation to most people reading her memoir. One really wishes Darst had just taken her own stab at writing fiction, instead of a whiny autobiography. Then she’d really know if fiction had ruined her life.

Winnipeg journalist Maureen Scurfield has supported herself and family as a writer for 30 years, though she doesn’t write fiction.