I haven’t finished this one yet, but I was initially struggling to identify which names went with which roles and how everyone was related to each other, so I made a family tree! Making this thread to share it and as a space for general discussion of the work if anyone is inclined to that.
EDIT: I missed a kid; I think the right side should have five instead of four.
Hmm, this looks right to me, but doesn’t the game keep saying there are 19 characters in the family group? Is there a missing kid somewhere?
Ah, you’re right… I specifically remember it saying the one family had six kids, so the other must have five instead of four!
Finished! I might return here with more thoughts later, or post something in my review thread, but for now I just wanted to talk about one of my reactions.
The main feeling this work has left me with is sadness that none of the three queer family members ever find solidarity with each other. The endings have them each going off on their own, never connecting over their shared identity or alienation from the rest of the family. In Lou’s ending, her final choice is “choose family / choose Lou”, but her family isn’t a monolith, which the work took pains to show.
So I’m trying to decide what my takeaway here is. Is it the rather cynical idea that these three finding genuine connection with each other is impossible due to the loudness of the majority’s homophobia? There’s a moment where Phil and Lou come close, but Phil chooses to clam up rather than open up. The fear engendered by the homophobes means it feels too risky to be honest with anyone in the family, even those who are also affected by it?
This seems to be the case for Phil, at least; her ending shows that keeping her gayness secret from her daughter is a very deliberate choice. She’s prioritizing her own safety over standing up for herself or her values, and over the possibility of connection with Lou, thus depriving Lou of any familial support. It makes sense, I can see why she’s made this decision, but damn it makes for kind of a bleak ending.
I’m in the middle of reading this and I’m with Lou (Or maybe it was Phil?): why aren’t we at a nice lake? This is my nightmare vacation. How do these people have so many kids??
I really should get round to finishing this piece. I did some more of it, but this passage hit me so hard I felt I had to leave it up for at least a little longer:
The hallways are fairly quiet, muffled sounds could be heard coming from some of the rooms only right as she passed by them. There are few windows in this hotel, unlike some of the nicer ones closer to the park, so when inside it feels as though it could be any time of day out, any season, and there would be no way to know it. She liked that about it, enjoyed the disorientation it presented. It was a vast, grey space she could let herself fall into. Let herself be enveloped by it. It was for this reason that she felt a sort of gravitational pull towards other spaces that created similar atmospheres. Diners, airports, malls, grocery stores. In any of them, she could put her headphones on and listen to one of the tapes she had made of her favorite radio shows, play it over and over until her brain was soothed, quiet enough to finally think clearly.
There must have been some moment, some night, when her brain stopped functioning the way she remembers it doing so in the past, but she really can’t put her finger on it. There was a time when she had been less concerned with the purpose of things, the act of them had been enough, if she was remembering correctly. She wasn’t sure anymore if there was such a thing as remembering correctly though. The more she poked at memories, even from just a couple of years ago, the more they shifted and kaleidoscoped into unrecognizable shapes. If she tried to ask someone else who had been there how they remembered it, their version wildly contradicted hers in all but the smallest of details. She imagined that her personality was built on these experiences she could no longer recall, and she wondered if that was why she felt so adrift all of the time. Her docking line had been severed and the shoreline looked wildly unfamiliar.
Things simply happened to her these days. She feels like she makes few deliberate choices, most of the logistics of her life are organized in the moment, as changeable as the wind around her. She followed other people where they wanted to go out at night, ordered the same drinks as them, laughed at jokes she vaguely understood. All of her energy went toward blending, merging, sliding. She wouldn’t say that she was unhappy. Nor bored, like everyone kept accusing her of being. She just, was. She was there. Life wasn’t some sparkling jewelry box she was eager to dig into, it was just a box where she stored her facts. Not because she wanted it to be this way but because she couldn’t figure out how to make it become anything greater than that. Music albums and movies were easy things to serve as footholds along the way. They marked time passing. Gave her symbols to hold up to describe herself instead of transparent words. Words were too honest.
When she said she wanted something interesting to happen, she supposed what she meant was that she wanted something that required more than just symbols to describe, or maybe something that couldn’t be distilled into anything more specific. She used the symbols to describe herself because she didn’t want to splay out her tangled-up heart for everyone to see every time she had to answer the question, “what have you been up to lately?”, not because she didn’t possess the right words. The right words, instead of the name of an album or a song, would’ve been, I’ve been trying to understand how to live my own life. I don’t know how to do anything other than watch.
