Granta 37: The Family: They Fuck You Up

Granta: The Magazine of New Writing #37

by Bill Buford (Editor)

A collection of essays on the subject of the family, by Mikal Gilmore,(Gary Gilmore's brother who has written compelling story - "Shot in the Heart", about the dysfunctional family which resulted in this tragic end), William Wharton, Mona Simpson, Geoffrey Biddle, Seamus Deane, Giorgio Pressburger, Marketa Luskacova, Geoffrey Wolff, Harold Pinter and Tracy Kidder.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Essays

256 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1991

About the author

William Holmes Buford is an American author and journalist. He is the author of the books Among the Thugs and Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. Buford was previously the fiction editor for The New Yorker, where he is still on staff. For sixteen years, he was the editor of Granta, which he relaunched in 1979. He is also credited with coining the term "dirty realism".

Reviews

[Vicky "phenkos"]

I borrowed this issue of Granta from a friend after I developed an interest in the itv series The Durrells and started reading Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals. I loved the series and the Durrell family but kept having this sense that something is not quite right, esp. in the relationship between Mother and her eldest son, Lawrence. The relationship between the two seems to be verging almost on the incestuous. Louisa and Lawrence seem to me to behave to each other more like a couple than mother and son. In addition, Lawrence's first wife who lived with them in Corfu, is completely written out of Gerald's story as well as the tv series - I had to check Lawrence Durrell's biography to find that when the family was in Corfu, Lawrence had a wife who lived with them. If you'd just watched the series, you'd have assumed that Lawrence was single at the time.

My research into the Durrell family led me to Sappho Durrell, Lawrence's daughter from his second wife, who had a short and tragic life committing suicide at the age of 34. The Granta issue includes her journals and letters to her father Lawrence which she had entrusted to a friend with the request that they be published after her own and her father's death.

The man depicted in these journals comes across as insecure and demanding. He sends his daughter newspaper cuttings of favourable reviews he has received and makes her aware of sexual affairs he has with young women her age. He signs a letter to her as"lover". This really set alarm bells ringing: a mistake or a Freudian slip? Sappho has a love/hate relationship with her father as we can see from her letters (which are full of warmth) and the juxtaposition with her journals where she says at one point that she wants to kill him. She feels threatened by his sexuaility and disgusted by the twin role daughter/wife he has prepared for her. One feels particularly pained by her suicide because Sappho Durrell can write; this much is pretty obvious in the selection of her journal writings although some of the psychoanalytic stuff is a bit disorganised.

Lawrence Durrell"s misogynistic attitide was evident in all his relationships with women (with the possible exception of his mother). He publicly humiliated Nancy although he was torn to pieces when she left him. This is a pattern he repeated with other women too. It's a shame that the shadowy aspect of this otherwise likeable family had to play itself out in such a hard way on Sappho. I guess it's the more sensitive and perceptive ones that are the most vulnerable.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I only read the Sappho Durrell section properly, while dipping into other stories. Will revisit it at another time, I'm sure. But her writing confirmed some of my suspicions on Durrell, I have to say...

[Julia · Rating 2 out of 5]

My aunt gave me this Granta as a joke (be sure to look at the cover for the full title) after a very enjoyable conversation on extended family dynamics. The issue was...less enjoyable just because the first two pieces are difficult to read because of how acutely they hew to the subtitle. Mikal Gilmore's essay about his brother who died by firing squad and Sappho Durrell's diaries (she later died by suicide; I'm not sure I want to revisit her dad's Alexandria Quartet now) were two very different but very adept portrayals of intense psychological pain. Oh! Plus later a story of a family of four that dies by roadside fire. Yeesh. There are some great photography series in other parts, and a story by Gregory Wolff (older brother of Tobias) is a palate cleanser at the end, but overall, this felt really uninterruptedly heavy to read. Not bad; just consider yourself forewarned should you ever come across it.

[Edmund Catlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this issue as compelling and engaging as I always find Granta, except for the dull second-to-last entry which I found immensely dull, in which the author goes on a middle-class sailing trip and thinks his son is a nice fellow whom he can trust with adulthood. Maybe I'd been too riled up and desensitized by the previous entries and their topics - murder, incest, the worst humanity has to offer - but I was exuberant when the penultimate story was done.

[Richard]

The full title of this volume is "The Family: they Fuck You Up" but fo some reason the good folks at Goodreads couldn't bring themselves to commit that to writing. This volume includes contributions by Sappho Durrell (daughter of the brilliant writer Lawrence Durrell and Eve Cohen), Mikal Gilmore (younger brother to the infamous Gary Gilmore who coined the phrase "Just Do It" while facing a firing squad in Utah (or was that Nike?), Geoffrey wolff (the lesser known but older brother of Tobias Wolff and author of the BRILLANT memoir "The Duke of Deception" about his some time father - his younger brother Tobias wrote his better known tale of his upbringing with his mother in "This Boy's Life" but I digress...

Sappho Durrell is not exactly a household name but if you know anyting aobut the name Durrell it's problably that her father is the author of "The Alexandria Quartet" comprised of Justine, Balthazar, Clea, Mountolive & Clea" and that her uncle Gerald is the autodidact naturalist who wrote some beautiful books about his idyllic and slightly crazy upbringing on the island of Corfu before WWII ("My Family And Other Animals", "Birds Beasts and Other Relatives")and in later life became a world renowned zoologist and contributed a multitude of great books on his collecting safaris in Africa. Durrell established one of the best known breeding zoos for endangered animals located on the Isle of Jersey off the coast of France.

The piece in Granta by Sappho Durrell includes bits form her ournals and exchanges with her manipulative, manaical father - she maintains that he raped her aas a child and naturally she was forever damaged from this incident which he never acknowledged as far as I know. Durrell's biographer admits that he was an impetuous, womanizer all his life discredits the rape accusation. Sappho portrays him as a manipulative beast of a father who essentially used her as a model for the characters in his novels (Sappho's mother Eve Cohen was widely thought to be the the mysterious jew Justine in the first book of the quartet) which if you haven't read it, I highly recommend that you do - it's less expensive than opium and just as effective.

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first three stories in this are tough to read: A remembrance of Gary Gilmore by his brother, which also works as a harsh recounting of Portland before its heyday; the diary entries of Lawrence Durrell's daughter, Sappho, who later committed suicide; and a very disturbing account of an entire family lost to field burning. Three stars because of a very shallow "memoirs of a backpacker" style piece on Egypt.

[Vasha7]

My journal entry