Every family will have a no-good brother-in-law, a crazed aunt or grandfather, a drunk, a homosexual, a member with an unutterable secret; the envied, the despised, the tolerated, the shunned. It is a compendium of humans—as flawed as we each know ourselves to be—endeavoring or constrained to live together under a set of customs, both based upon and engendering myth. For myth is the expression of an otherwise ungraspable perception; it grows from necessity and persists as it is operationally useful. When it is supplanted as unreasonable, blasphemous, or absurd, it creates the chaos allowing
...more
