by Madelle Morgan
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| My sister teaches our niece (15) to sailboard. |
My three sisters, mother, aunt and I rented a nine bedroom lodge at a lake for a week in July and shared the cooking.
The family is distributed among multiple towns and cities.
Winter storms make it difficult to get together in December.
Our annual summer reunion
is the only opportunity to connect with family members in person – a time to take
the pulse of each other’s lives and celebrate milestones. This year one niece
was recently engaged and another just graduated from college, two nephews will
start high school and college respectively in the fall, a sister and her latest
partner (third time’s a charm) bought a house, we celebrated my mother’s 80th
birthday, and we collectively acknowledged the five year anniversary of our
husband-brother-father-grandfather’s passing.
Reunions can be
wonderful. Family history is shared. Old memories are exhumed for dissection
and reassembly. Each person who was present at an event has a different
perspective, like piecing together puzzle pieces into a more accurate big
picture view. Our kids grow up so fast. There’s a sense of time running out for
the older family members: “We’d better get together while they’re still in good
health.” Time together is precious and fleeting.
Reunions can be
enlightening. After a few glasses of wine in the dark on the porch, secrets
can surface. You find out things they’d never
reveal on the phone or in email. Advice is given and ignored. Relationships strengthen
due to sharing experiences and “what’s-going-on-in-my-life”.
Reunions can shape
who is considered part of a family, whether they're biological relatives, dear friends, or current and former partners and their relatives. Some people aren’t welcome at a reunion, some are
missed, some are considered just plain embarrassing... especially by sensitive
teens.
Oh, the gamut of feelings associated with family: love and
romance, conflict, jealousy, coming of age, tragedy, drama, comedy, old and
fresh grievances, joys and sorrows, and on and on.
Is this emotional range why family sagas are so popular with
readers? Is it because readers identify with the characters’ problems and
goals? Or do they simply love to read about complex family relationships? Or
they’d like to discover solutions to their own family issues?
Do you love reading novels about families, and if so, why?
5 comments:
Sounds like you have a large and interesting family, Madelle. Family dynamics always provide great fodder for conflict, emotion, romance, and even mystery. That's why I love reading family stories and why I include lots of family drama in my own India-centric books.
I totally agree, Shobhan. Welcome to Romancing the Genres! I look forward to reading your posts and books.
Madelle, Families are all you've mentioned and an unending fountain of information. While I've enjoyed reading family sagas currently I'm learning more about my own background on my mother's side. I recently visited with my 104 year old aunt who mentioned she thought her grandmother had had "marital difficulties". "Oh, why do you think that?" I asked. "Well," my aunt replied. "She divorced grandpapa after 8 children."
I checked the family tree and learned she divorced her husband sometime after 1903 when her last child was born and 1924 when he died.
My aunt went on to say she thought her grandmother had been shunned by others in the small town where they lived (and all 8 children had been born).
Who needs to read a family saga when they have this to explore in their own history?
Judith, divorce was almost unheard of in those days. What a story must be behind the grandmother's decision. I am thinking she must have been one brave and determined woman.
I do agree that the stories in our own families rival or better anything we can make up!
Family truths are often stranger than fiction. Maybe that's part of the attraction of family sagas: anything goes - and readers know it could really happen.
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