Tag Archives: family dynamics

August:Osage County and the familiarity of dysfunctional families


Just back from this film, and I have to tell you it is a “high-residue” one, according to my family’s categorizing system.

Things like James Bond movies, adventures, most comedies – they’re fun, low residue. You watch them, forget them. You might remember one line, one scene. “Silence of the Lambs”, a mid-residue one. You remember the horror, the sucking of the lips. Other stuff slips away.

This one will stay with me, though. At first glance, August:OC seems like one of the long lasting set of dysfunctional family movies, with scarce humour and a certain grindingness about the endless anger and bad behaviour of everyone involved. Drug abuse, alcohol abuse, years of unsatisfactory conversations and relationships. Generations struggling with the baggage.

But then it grips you. The stories, though gruelling and very challenging for the audience (I heard a lot of gasping as the family secrets were let out, one by one, like goat droppings in the sand) – but the acting and the actors made the movie worth the endurance test. This family leads and has led a hellish series of lives. I can’t help but wonder how I would have turned out after such events. And yet, and yet, in so many ways they are the typical family, trying for the best for their kids, losing themselves along the way, making mistakes, picking favourites, keeping back what should have been said, making deals with one another. It is all both intensely familiar and chillingly strange.

As we were leaving the theatre, several women were chatting and smiled up at us. “Great movie,” they said, “highlights the weirdness in all of our families.”

That it did. I saw scenes my mother wouldn’t have been out of place in. I had a flashback to my wedding day. I revisited places I’d lived in myself – not the whole terrible mess of this family, but certainly little peeks through the blinds at them.

I think I’ll be unpacking this film for a few days yet.

So, not necessarily a pleasant movie, but a thought-provoking one, incredibly well-acted. Worth the viewing, though you may not want to take your family members with you…

Writing close to the bone


I’m currently writing a piece that is about a woman, looking at the body of her husband, and her conflicted feelings about the death of some one she had to care for for years.

It’s kind of about my mum, but not my mum. I have no idea how she felt when my dad died. I’ve never had to provide ongoing care to someone other than my kids, and they grew up. So I’m wandering in her imaginary head, putting thoughts in there that probably never existed there. She’s no longer around to object.

Still, it’s oddly cleansing to do it.

My family never talked about anything like feelings. We weren’t really supposed to have them. We weren’t supposed to love or care or talk about how we felt about anything.

A lot of the time it was pretty lonely, and I’m still learning valuable life lessons about interdependence and letting go and allowing myself to ask for what I want out of life and relationships. I still don’t talk about feelings much, except perhaps with my galpals, and maybe not even then.

But the feelings go into my writing. They make me write dark or funny or bitter or sweet (not too much of the latter, mind). They make me have to write. So maybe it’s a good thing we didn’t talk about them much. I have a rich, untapped vein, ready for the mining.

So off I go, making up vicious thought, killing off people or having them kill. Playing with their hearts and minds to rehearse what normal relationships might feel like, what malign ones might do to a person.

Some things won’t see he light of day – too dark, too personal. But when I write close to the bone, that’s when my writing is best. Tis a conundrum.