In Their Own Way

  "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

These are Tolstoy's words, just so there is no confusion, but I do agree with them. They were the words that came into my mind as I finished reading Mary Trump's book,  Who Could Ever Love You: A Family Memoir. It comes fast on the heels of her previous tome, Too Much And Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. My wife gave me the sequel, of sorts, just a few weeks before the election. As I tore my way through the accounts of dysfunction, I truly believed that I was watching history unravel. Until the results were in. 

The progress I had made stopped. For a couple weeks as the thought of this Dangerous Man becoming "president" once again made me unwilling to finish the story of Mary's traumatic childhood among some of the creepiest people this side of Anna Karenina. 

Then, after the reality of a second Trumpreich began to settle in, I picked put the book again, anxious to discover if the poor little girl found a way to usurp her wicked uncle's power. 

Spoiler Alert: Nope. Cheated out of her inheritance and kicked to the curb for trying to connect with a family that had all but disowned her, Mary has spent the past eight years trying to find the off switch to the machine that keeps the evil flowing. 

Then I thought about Tolstoy's quote. I thought about all those unhappy families that continue to promulgate and send their unhappiness out into the world to generate still more wickedness. For a moment I thought to insert the notion that money is somehow the root of all evil, but then again, so is the lack of money. Money can't buy me love, after all. Sometimes it creates a facsimile, something akin to comfort without any real understanding. You can buy comfort, or at least the trappings of it. Once you have all the stuff, you still want more because you're empty inside. 

I finished Mary's book, and let it go. Nothing could stop the unhappiness from spilling out into the world. All that sadness. All that pain. Painted over in bright orange. 

Not a happy orange, either.