The News from Gridleyville

“How can one family have so many problems, especially a Jewish family?” says my wife, who considers her own childhood in a secular Jewish household the model for all such. On my recommendation, she’s been reading Ona Gritz’s memoir Everywhere I Look, in which the author’s family suffers—and creates—multiple disasters.

An accomplished writer in middle age, Gritz sets out to investigate the life of her older sister, Angie, who was murdered as a young woman along with her husband, child, and unborn baby. This was more than 40 years ago. Though she adored Angie, the author had always felt guilty for being the favored child and failing to stand up for her sibling. In a way, Gritz told herself, she was responsible for Angie’s many troubles, from the rebellious childhood to the adult life exposed to drugs, dubious characters, and violence.

It takes courage, then, to probe the family history, and the more Gritz does so, the more secrets emerge, not only about Angie but about their parents, their cousins, their aunts and uncles. All families have secrets, of course, and the sensational ones have driven many a plot in memoir and novel. In Gritz’s case there are indeed some further biggies that come to light—facts not just concealed but deliberately lied about.

The reader wonders, What the fuck could they have been thinking? How did this one family, as my wife mutters, get so screwed up? Gritz does a good job of exploring the characters of these people so capable of neglect, poor decisions, and pernicious deception. Perhaps, as she writes in the final chapter, they were “more ignorant than malicious.”

It’s the kind of question that can’t really be answered. In place of explanation, we have to settle for emotional resolution. The book concludes at the cemetery where Angie is buried. Angie’s name, and that of her young son, are missing from the headstone, and Gritz arranges to fix the engraving. As she has done throughout, she speaks directly to her murdered sister:

“So much had been withheld and taken from you in your brief life, and I’d been incapable of doing anything about it. Now, finally, I’d figured out a way to stand up for you, and soon I’d do it again by writing our story. I’d say that I remember. I’d mark that you were here.”