Over the years, I’ve always sought out stories about families – by birth or by choice.

• The Chronicles of Narnia (paid link).
• The Baby-Sitters Club (paid link).
• The Fast and the Furious (paid link).
• I would even include Remember Me by Mary Higgins Clark.

I’m talking about Shirley Jackson’s “Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings” (paid link).

I commiserated with her stories about her family and the goofy stuff they’d suffered together. Even a situation as silly as who left the hose out.

I wondered why I gravitate towards stories about fictional and nonfictional families. Is there a universal truth about being a part of a family?

It’s not that I don’t enjoy stories about orphans — though there is always a glut of those — but I think it’s because everyone has a story to tell.

I didn’t have the idyllic family life that Ms. Jackson and her husband gave to their kids.

However, I won’t comment on the destruction of their marriage because that’s not what the book is about here.

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’

Leo Tolstoy

I grew up in a military family. There were long stretches where Dad was over there. Wherever over there happened to be. He couldn’t be there for my birth; he was on the ice in Antarctica.

What hits me like a ton of bricks about this collection is that all families are identical, no matter what your station.

You have the annoying older brother, girly-girl kid sister, and dog who slobbers on your things. You also live in a creaky old house that moans and creaks during windy days.

I enjoyed this collection immensely.

The book gives you a peek into the mind of a brilliant writer. The stories show her writing process in bits and pieces and how the bits and pieces of a mundane family life influenced the work that we know and love.