family secrets
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There’s this little store in Paris that sells all these old photographs from anonymous and unknown photographers. I’m not sure how the owner finds them, but I imagine him at flea markets and estate sales buying up old family albums and taking out the photos that look interesting.
The gallery has a bin full of these smaller photographs you can buy for a couple of euros and you could spend hours or months or lifetimes in there looking through the photos and imagining the lives of the people in them and the stories they’ve passed down through generations.
I think if you went back through generations, every family would have a secret—something shocking or wonderful or unbelievable that happened that changed people’s lives forever, whether or not they knew it. So many of my favorite books are full of these secrets, showing us how one incident or action or person can affect future generations for years to come.
There’s something I cant resist about a book that spans 100 years in the life of a single family. It’s a front-row seat to the generational drama and trauma that can define people that haven’t even been born yet. And what these books have in common is a mesmerizing balance of horror and awe that we get to time travel to discover.
Here are some of my favorites. This is by no means an exhaustive list of books, so I’d love to know your favorites. I know there’s got to be a good book about India I’m missing.
what to read
Ranked from best to least-best*
Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi - slavery, civil rights, and the struggle for equity, as seen through generations of a Ghanaian-American family
Pachinko by Min Jin Lee - Korean refugees navigate poverty and ambition in Japan
The Vanishing Half by Britt Bennett - everybody’s favorite new book of 2020 that I can’t recommend enough
House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende - creepy, haunting book about a wealthy Chilean family
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides - incest and middle-class suburbia
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez - magical realism and revenge in Colombia
East of Eden by John Steinbeck - weirdly interesting farm town drama