Two Memoirs Driven by Family Secrets: "Miss Aluminum" and "The Escape Artist"

I have just read two memoirs whose driving force is the family secrets that the two memoirists’ lives were built on, and the massively dysfunctional families that they each grew up in. The novelist Susanna Moore has had a fascinating and successful life as an actress, model, and – especially – a writer. Her life has been glamorous in many ways, and this memoir – “Miss Aluminum” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020) is full of stories of famous movie stars, directors, writers, and others she has known and in some cases had romantic and/or sexual relationships with. But throughout, she is deeply negatively affected by questions about her mother’s death, and by the bad experiences she had with her stepmother, among other difficulties in her childhood. Fortunately, she also had some very kind people in her life who helped her along the way. Lawyer and writer Helen Fremont’s memoir, “The Escape Artist” (Gallery Books, 2020) is also dominated by family secrets and family dysfunction: the secrets her parents keep from her about their background in Europe during World War II, the secrets her mother keeps from her father, and the secrets her sister Lara and she keep from each other. There is great love in the family, but the love is almost always overshadowed by the intensity of the dysfunction, and by the various psychological problems each of the four members of this sad nuclear family experience, most dramatically and frighteningly in the case of Lara. Both of these memoirs are extremely readable and compelling. And it is encouraging that both of the authors seem to have prevailed and eventually “graduated” to a calmer and better life than their troubled and turbulent backgrounds would predict. On a personal note, reading such memoirs about such difficult lives makes me more grateful than ever for having had the great gift of a calm, happy childhood with wonderful, loving parents. That is not to say that everything was perfect, for them or for me, but any bumps in the road were very, very minor compared to the ones these two writers and their families experienced.