Helen Peppe on Honesty and Memoir: Pigs Can’t Swim

Helen Peppe’s memoir,Pigs Can’t Swim, is a pinnacle of family dysfunction: funny, heart wrenching, stupefying and sometimes infuriating. Herparents’ insistence on nonsensical rules, old wive’s tales and skewed morals befuddle the youngest child of nineraisedin the backwoods of Maine. Here is a girl who is told by her parents that their house is haunted, is convinced she’s to blame when a married man guilts her into performing sexual favors at age 12, and has never purchased anything from a st...