Dysfunctional? The word isn’t big enough for this California family. “As soon as you’re eighteen, you’re out of here,” her mother told See, who quickly married. Not surprisingly, her husband was a drunk; later she remarried, and the third time she got it right. Though loved and reasonably well cared for, her two daughters learned early on to fend for themselves while the grownups were embroiled in trauma.
See could have drenched this story in self-pity and psychobabble; instead, she brings a deadpan wit to it. “The Sturaks were fierce; you had to look sharp just to stay alive,” she writes about her second set of in-laws. “When Tom was a little kid, his young mother took him home to visit the family. As Tom read a comic book, one of his cousins came up behind him with a hammer and knocked him out cold.” Perhaps the closest literary antecedents to “Dreaming” are those jocular tales of domestic life that were popular in the ’50s-books like Betty MacDonald’s “The Egg and I” and Shirley Jackson’s “Life Among the Savages.” See puts the dark side of domesticity front and center, but her tone of dry bemusement is heir to theirs.
By the end of “Dreaming,” the family has pulled itself together at last, thanks to therapy and a major reduction in substance abuse. “How did we get so lucky?” See wonders. And yet if there’s a flaw here, it’s See’s willingness to take the long view of her family’s appalling past. “There’s something to be said for the free fall, the wild life,” she writes. “It’s given us our stories, and made us who we are.” Uh-uh. There’s the wild life, and then there’s beating your kid with a stick. See is probably right when she suggests that her past was as typical as tuna casserole, but that still doesn’t merit a happy-go-lucky moral. The bad times were just plain bad. What’s good is the book.
