Fiction Ruined My Family

August 22, 2011
In this memoir, freelance writer Darst has a brilliant eye for the absurd, sad, and often hilarious circumstances of her family life. Darst grew up as the youngest of four daughters. Her father, a lover of books and literature, came from a prestigious newspaper family. Her mother, a little rich girl, was a celebrated child equestrian. Yet Darst’s childhood reality—never enough money, “a stay-in-bed mom,” and a stay-at-home writer dad—didn’t jibe with the golden family saga. The jarring discrepancy set the family up for disaster. The family left St. Louis for New York in 1976, where her father began writing the Great American Novel, which never sold. He stopped writing and merely talked about it, her mother’s drinking increased, and Darst followed her example (“Her drinking was also completely out of control, which was infuriating, as I was trying to enjoy some out-of-control drinking myself”). Darst’s parents divorced, and their lives took a further turn downward: her father is mistaken for a homeless panhandler and her mother becomes “less and less of a mother you could take out in public.” With her own life a mess, Darst realizes she embodies the worst qualities of both her parents. With cutting language, she chronicles the perils and joys of the writing life and her journey toward sobriety and truth.

August 15, 2011

A woman's post-adolescent coming-of-age amid her less-than-conventional family.

In her debut memoir, Darst chronicles the subject she knows best—playing the part of the youngest daughter to her failed writer father and alcoholic mother. Add to the mix a group of three equally peculiar sisters—"a book-hater, a compulsive reader, a paperwork fanatic"—and the readers are left with a startlingly frank account of a family seemingly on leave from the loony bin. As a child, Darst naively placed her faith in her father's writing, assuring herself that "things aren't going that great now, but it's all about to change, drastically, because Dad's gonna sell this novel..." He never did, and as the family's financial hardships worsened, so did her mother's alcoholic tendencies, both of which provided an unstable home life that eventually crumbled down around them. While Darst's humorous tone guards readers from the memoir's darker moments, occasionally readers may yearn for a slightly more serious take. The author's troubles with crabs (of the STD variety), a failed lesbian interaction and an incident involving a bowel movement and a plastic bag all serve as further proof of intimate encounters exploited for humor rather than examined on any deeper level (though admittedly, there is little insight to be gleaned from the plastic-bag incident). Despite its surface-level story, Darst's work offers readers plenty of laughs, though it could benefit from a few more tears.

A comic tale of a drifting writer's stumblings beyond her family's eccentricities onto her own path toward happiness.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 1, 2011
The memoir craze has left many writers ruing their happy, functional childhoods. Not Darst: her father was a failed novelist, her mother an alcoholic clinging to her socialite youth. That's enough fodder to keep Darst under publishing contract for decades. Her debut opens as the family moves from St. Louis to New York, where her father can focus on his latest book. Early chapters feel reminiscent of David Sedaris: off-kilter domestic scenes played for laughs. But Darst's humor gains bite as she reaches adulthood and begins to exhibit the worst traits of both parents as a stalled writer and a falling-down drunk. Darst is fearless in presenting herself as selfish, callous, and out of control, which is entertaining in a raunchy, R-rated, gross-out-comedy kind of way. At 30, Darst takes stock of her future: I'd be that aged temp . . . waiting for five o'clock to get blotto. So she sobers up, dials down the crazy (though not all the way), and redefines what it means to be an artist. A more reflective voice emerges, one capable of living with her past.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)