Maybe fiction ruined her memoir Fiction Ruined My Family By Jeanne Darst Riverhead Books, 303 pages, $30

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 17/12/2011 (5038 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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.