In fact, I accidentally wrote a novel about the family. When I sat down to type the first pages of my novel, Leave your mess at homewhich was published on April 14, I intended to write a kind of anti-romantic novel, something like a great unrequited love story that would explore all the reasons why romantic love in its modern iteration seems more of a rarity than a common occurrence. But from the beginning I quickly lost interest in the task I had given myself. Hoping to fully understand the protagonist of my novel and understand her particular way of loving, I would need to know who her family had been to her. Her siblings each struck me as fascinating people, some of them clamoring for my attention while others offered quiet but undeniable affirmations that they, too, bore witness to this business of learning to love. Their personalities and voices each came to me differently, as did their various conflicts, making me wonder what kind of home had given birth to four children who were each so… wild and who together struggled to find a safe haven in each other.
The American Psychological Association defines a dysfunctional family as one in which “relationships or communication are impaired and members are unable to achieve closeness and self-expression.” By this definition, the Longe family begins the novel in a very dysfunctional state of affairs. One sister is the scapegoat, the other the golden child, the other the people pleaser and the youngest a lost child. Cast into these archetypal roles, they each struggle to identify what they want, who they are, and who they might want to be for each other. They share, of course, some characteristics, such as being second-generation Nigerian immigrants from a working-class background, as well as struggling with sometimes conflicting cultural expectations. Also, they all happen to share, in the two months we meet, problems with love. Messy families are common, some might even say ubiquitous, so what does it take to make a person stay with a reader?
As I look back on my journey in creating this novel, I am excited to reflect on the many books that taught me something about how to make a messy family compelling. I read some of these books before I had any idea of the specific family it comprised Leave your mess at home. I read the others well after I had finished my novel. But each provided the necessary education about how the family creates our personality, how it can be a unit of belonging or a unit of non-belonging, how it can be a refuge from oppressive systems in the world outside the home or reconstruct them within the home. Writing can be such an isolating job, and I’m grateful that along the way I’ve had these books to turn to as a comfort and a nod of affirmation.
