Scan barcode
A review by liralen
Epilogue by Will Boast
3.0
Every family has its secrets, but when Boast's father died—following his mother and brother—Boast learned just how deeply his family's secrets ran.
When I initially read the description of the book, I thought that Boast's father had had two families simultaneously, keeping each a secret from the other. The truth was rather more mundane—his father had previously been married, and Boast had half-brothers. But the effort the family put in to keep Boast and his brother (everybody else knew) in the dark is astounding: Whenever we visited [Boast's grandmother], I came to learn, Dad called ahead and had his mother take down all the pictures of my half brothers. Even as teenagers, Rory and I got into everything. We explored every inch of that bungalow—and never noticed the empty spaces on the walls, the scattered patches of wallpaper unfaded by sun. But what strikes me now, apart from the savage meticulousness of my father's secrecy, is that Granny Boast kept those photos of Arthur and Harry hanging, long after all hope of seeing them again had passed, restoring them to their rightful places in the family every time Dad had her take them down. It broke Granny Boast's heart, Aunty Sarah tells me, that she never saw her first two grandsons grow up (186–187).
This is one of those messy stories in which question after question unfolds, each making the story more complicated; with both Boast's parents gone, it is impossible for him to get many of those questions answered, or to fully understand their perspectives. Yet his half-brothers are able to answer some questions, and to paint a picture of a younger version of their father that astonished Boast: a man who, unlike the relatively retiring man Boast remembered, had been abusive, a philanderer, something of a dandy.
Now...I was not always particularly keen on the way Boast writes his own character, and that got in the way for me more than once. I also wondered whether he had just...too much information at times. The revelations about his father are big, and they take up the bulk of the book...but there's more that comes much later in the book (~269) and really isn't touched. This information came late in his research game, and I'm not sure if he thought that was something to investigate for another work or whether it just all felt like too much.
Messy things, families.
When I initially read the description of the book, I thought that Boast's father had had two families simultaneously, keeping each a secret from the other. The truth was rather more mundane—his father had previously been married, and Boast had half-brothers. But the effort the family put in to keep Boast and his brother (everybody else knew) in the dark is astounding: Whenever we visited [Boast's grandmother], I came to learn, Dad called ahead and had his mother take down all the pictures of my half brothers. Even as teenagers, Rory and I got into everything. We explored every inch of that bungalow—and never noticed the empty spaces on the walls, the scattered patches of wallpaper unfaded by sun. But what strikes me now, apart from the savage meticulousness of my father's secrecy, is that Granny Boast kept those photos of Arthur and Harry hanging, long after all hope of seeing them again had passed, restoring them to their rightful places in the family every time Dad had her take them down. It broke Granny Boast's heart, Aunty Sarah tells me, that she never saw her first two grandsons grow up (186–187).
This is one of those messy stories in which question after question unfolds, each making the story more complicated; with both Boast's parents gone, it is impossible for him to get many of those questions answered, or to fully understand their perspectives. Yet his half-brothers are able to answer some questions, and to paint a picture of a younger version of their father that astonished Boast: a man who, unlike the relatively retiring man Boast remembered, had been abusive, a philanderer, something of a dandy.
Now...I was not always particularly keen on the way Boast writes his own character, and that got in the way for me more than once. I also wondered whether he had just...too much information at times. The revelations about his father are big, and they take up the bulk of the book...but there's more
Spoiler
his mother had previously been married as well...and had given up a baby for adoption when she was 14Messy things, families.