Every Family Has a Story: How We Inherit Love and Loss

In these astute case studies, psychotherapist Samuel (This Too Shall Pass) investigates the complex emotions that family can inspire. She tells the stories of “eight families as they face a particular challenge, charting them through multiple generations” with a focus on the legacy of trauma. The client studies include a gay couple from different cultural backgrounds navigating the adoption process, a family dealing with the aftermath of a child’s death, five generations of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family grappling with their matriarch’s escape from the Holocaust, and a father coming to terms with his impending death from cancer. The author excels at distilling shrewd insights from her subjects, such as when she notes that the manner in which one tells a story can offer catharsis, and recounts how she helped three sisters make sense of their father’s suicide by constructing a narrative that accounted for his PTSD and the stigma around mental illness. Samuel’s candor offers an unusually intimate look at how therapists work, as when she admits that she rushed an adult client who was not ready to process the news that the man who raised him was not his biological father. Covering a broad array of family structures and dilemmas, this quietly dazzling consideration of what it means to be a family is sure to resonate. (Nov.)