“I don’t remember any of that,” writes Liz Welch in The Kids Are All Right, a heart-rending new memoir she co-authored with her brother and two sisters about their transition from members of an elite Connecticut family to orphans and outcasts. The book shifts in perspective between the four Welch siblings, whose ages span more than a decade.
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The first of the book’s three parts sets family tragedy before a backdrop of opulence. Their father’s death in a suspicious car accident brings rumors of his involvement with the C.I.A. His unsavory business dealings in Central America leave the wealthy family saddled with debt. This forces his widow, a gorgeous soap opera star who is battling cancer, to sell the “house, pool, and poolhouse.”
In the parts that follow, the Welch children run unsupervised through the emotional gauntlet of young adulthood while their mother ails in the next room. When she dies, parenthood duties are farmed out to a broad cast of characters, good and evil, leaving the orphans to search widely for themselves and each other. They ultimately stake a new claim on family life in Louisa, Virginia, where the oldest child, Amanda, buys a rickety country home and hosts for holidays.
The book’s multiple perspectives unearth meaningful discrepancies that inevitably arise when a family tries to render a collective past. Some of these are less meaningful than others; as Steiff teddy bears and pony rides give way to bong rips and benders, two sisters can’t agree who they paid to kick guests out of a keg party. But elsewhere, it shows the peculiar sensitivity one has to a sibling’s emotions in a time of need.
Amanda and Dan, both outwardly rebellious, serve as reminders that, Hamlet aside, eternal tragedies cast juvenile angst in an unflattering light. (“‘You cannot wear leather pants to your father’s funeral,’ Mom pleaded.”) But their evenhanded, often terse explorations show that the tragedy of losing one’s family begets that angst even as it belittles it. The youngest of the bunch, Diana, was too young to remember the earlier events. Her moody reconstructions—when her mother dies, she feels like “cotton floating apart from the stem”—feel more true to the processes of memory. Such ethereal musings go a long way to temper the authors’ natural tendency to narrativize things like death that operate on their own schedule.
As the title suggests, pop culture references do a lot of heavy lifting. The farthest we go into “an ’80s world of alternative music and drugs” is a Buster Poindexter concert. But aside from the occasional “ha” of recollection (much of this stuff happened in the ’80s, folks), The Kids Are All Right is not a funny book, but an affecting portrait of death in panorama. Just happens its authors watched their share of John Hughes films.