Jeanne Darst recounts a life filled with wrong choices, poor decisions, and a general lack of interest from her alcoholic parents and her apathetic sisters. As might be expected, this is not a happy story, but it has it’s occasional funny bits. I can’t think of any at the moment, but I did smile once or twice.
Fiction Ruined My Family is not really about Jeanne Darst, it’s more about her father and his quest to write the ultimate tell all book about Zelda and Scot Fitzgerald. By the time I finished this collection of personal horror stories I found that I really wanted to read the book about F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Themed Memoirs stick mostly to one topic. Kitchen Confidential talks about being a line cook. Dishwasher talks about washing dishes. My Lobotomy talks about having your brain mutilated. And so it is with Fiction Ruined My Family, she chooses the note of self humiliation and runs with it. If we take the tale on it’s literal face value, then it is impossible to even conceive of the person we are told about writing a book and having it published.
She tells of nothing, I mean NOTHING, good that ever happens to her. So that when the finial few chapters roll to an end and she is a published writer, a successful play-write, and traveling the world putting on a one woman show, it rings false with the rest of the story. Yes, she mentions in passing that she has been to a writer’s workshop and that she has friends everywhere, but it still feels like Earl finding the winning Lotto ticket.
At the start of her sad, sad story, she says that she did not want to follow the path that her parents followed. She says that she found out how to write, and not just talk about writing. But she never shares this secret with the rest of us, she shows a glimpse into her life of working at home where she can go to fridge and help herself whenever she feels like it, but says nothing about what her actual working life is like.
The book ends pretty abruptly, with her worrying that her insane and near homeless father might take offense at being portrayed as insane and near homeless. She seems to have no qualms about coming across as insane herself.
Maybe Fiction Ruined My Family is just not a book I get. I found nothing all that funny about body lice, having a bowel movement in a plastic bag, getting drunk and blacking out after having sex with random strangers, and never having enough money for silly things like food and rent.
Fiction Ruined My Family is also filled with New York City slang and references to varied and sundry street numbers and locations which have no meaning to anyone not living in NYC. Which is kind of the point, if you don’t live in New York, well, you’re not really living, are you?
In the end, it doesn’t even serve as a cautionary tale of this could happen to you, because the lowlife wastrel ends up getting everything she ever wanted. Well, we all love a happy ending, right?
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