“Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina, an oft-quoted line that deserves its own Hallmark card at this point. It’s a truism that the cover subject of our Sept. 15 issue, Mary L. Trump, understands all too well, and her uniquely unhappy family was already the subject of a bestselling memoir, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man (2021). The dangerous man in question, of course, is the author’s uncle, Donald Trump; she attributes his character—“arrogant” and “cruel,” in her words—to the emotional abuse he and his siblings suffered at the hands of their father, Fred Trump, a “high-functioning sociopath” who pitted the brothers against one another.
The Trump family is again the focus of Mary’s new book, Who Could Ever Love You (St. Martin’s, Sept. 10), though the camera angle has shifted: Here we learn more about her father, Freddy, Donald’s eldest brother, who was subjected to the “stifling control and blanket disapproval” of their father; he died, alcoholic and broken, when Mary was just a teen. And we learn about her mother, Linda, who married into this toxic clan and found herself iced out when Freddy died. As she tells contributor Marion Winik in a recent interview, this upbringing left Mary in intensive trauma therapy and still, after two books, sifting through the wreckage.
Memoirs of dysfunctional families could have their own number in the Dewey Decimal System. Here are a few other recent titles that our critics recommend:
Everything/Nothing/Someone by Alice Carrière (2023): The author of this intense and unforgettable memoir grew up privileged in a Manhattan town house, the daughter of artist Jennifer Bartlett and actor Mathieu Carrière. Their aloofness and self-absorption left her unmoored, and at a young age she began to self-harm. The onset of a full-blown dissociative state led her to a psychiatric facility and, eventually, a kind of healing—all of it depicted in vivid and evocative prose. Our starred review calls it a “spellbinding memoir.”
Don’t Call Me Home by Alexandra Auder (2023): The daughter of Warhol “superstar” Viva (and older sister of actor Gaby Hoffmann) grew up in the Chelsea Hotel at the mercy of her mercurial mother’s moods and whims. Visits to Viva’s childhood home reveal that the star came from a fractious family of her own. These memories are interspersed with current-day episodes in which Viva, as difficult and imperious as ever, visits her adult married daughter. “Auder makes the most of her magnificent mess of material,” says our starred review.
Feeding Ghosts by Tessa Hulls (MCD/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 5). This astonishing graphic memoir, dense with personal narratives and the events of modern Chinese history, represents the author/illustrator’s reckoning with her immigrant mother and grandmother. Sun Yi was a journalist who ran afoul of the Communist authorities and suffered a mental breakdown from which she never truly recovered. Her daughter, Rose, living in the United States as an adult, was scarred by her mother’s decline and felt caught between two worlds. Hulls’ trip to China with Rose inspired this work that “glimmers with insight, acumen, and an unwillingness to settle for simple answers,” according to our starred review.
Tom Beer is the editor-in-chief.
