All Happy Families: A Memoir

Description

A prominent French writer delves into his own history in this eloquent reflection on dysfunctional family relationships. New York Times Bestselling and Goncourt Prize-Winning Author of The Anomaly A prominent French writer delves into his own history in this eloquent reflection on dysfunctional family relationships. Herve Le Tellier did not consider himself to have been an unhappy child-he was not deprived, or beaten, or abused. And yet he understood from a young age that something was wrong, and longed to leave. Children sometimes have only the option of escaping, driven by their even greater love of life. Having reached a certain emotional distance at sixty years old, and with his father and stepfather dead and his mother suffering from late-stage Alzheimer's disease, Le Tellier finally felt able to write the story of his family. Abandoned early by his father and raised in part by his grandparents, he was profoundly affected by his relationship with his mother, a troubled woman with damaging views on love. In this perceptive, deeply personal account, Le Tellier attempts to look back on trying times without anger or regret, and sometimes even with humor.

Herve Le Tellieris a writer, journalist, mathematician, food critic, and teacher. He has been a member of the Oulipo group since 1992 and one of the "papous" of the famous France Culture radio show. He has published fifteen books of stories, essays, and novels, includingEnough About Love(Other Press, 2011),The Sextine Chapel(Dalkey Archive Press, 2011), andA Thousand Pearls(Dalkey Archive Press, 2011). Adriana Hunterstudied French and Drama at the University of London. She has translated more than eighty books, including Veronique Olmi'sBakhitaand Herve Le Tellier'sElectrico W, winner of the French-American Foundation's 2013 Translation Prize in Fiction. She lives in Kent, England.

"Acutely observed...An unexpected coming-of-age tale." -BBC "Moving...The writing is unquestionably sincere." -Kirkus Reviews "What distinguishes Le Tellier's memoir from the glut of family memoirs that have captivated and horrified readers over the last twenty years? In part, it's the author's plastic imagination: his willingness to let language loose on the discoveries he's made about the family...he brings warmth and intelligibility to cold, lost lives." -Kenyon Review "A harrowing...and searingly honest reflection on family dysfunction." -France Today "All Happy Families pulls apart the fabric of a dysfunctional family to show its underpinnings, complex and heartbreaking, delicate and nuanced...Le Tellier's masterful writing does his characters justice while not letting them go unscathed, and his ability to see his life and his family with tenderness and love is a blueprint for how we can continue in the face of our pasts. A tender and moving read, its stories stayed with me long after the last page." -Tanya Marquardt, author of Stray: Memoir of a Runaway Praise for Electrico W: "An engaging snapshot of these [characters'] briefly intersecting lives." -New York Times Book Review "Romantic and atmospheric, this novel also benefits from a particularly fine sense of place and time...witty, sad, and interesting." -Publishers Weekly "Delicate handling of deep themes--loss, missed connections, meaninglessness--gives the novel an emotional charge." -Kirkus Reviews