Essay: The Only Normal One

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a young woman of independent means and moderate disposition will, upon returning to her ancestral home for a visit of any length, suddenly come face-to-face with the realization that her family is totally bat-shit crazy.

The working title for this novel, which always made me smile, even though I knew it would never make it onto the actual cover, was Cousin Marilyn in Massachusetts. It was partially a J. D. Salinger tribute—“Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut” being the greatest short story ever written—but I was also referencing an iconic female character from my childhood, Cousin Marilyn from the 1960s TV show The Munsters.

Cousin Marilyn was blond and beautiful and normal and lived happily with a family of monsters. Nice monsters. Loving monsters. Caring monsters. But still…monsters. Vampires, werewolves, dead body parts put together to make a man. Like that.

Being the only nonmonster made Marilyn the family freak, kind of like in that Twilight Zone episode where the beautiful blond is considered ugly because everyone else in the world looks like a deformed pig. (You know, it just occurred to me that all my references come from black-and-white TV shows—clearly I never went to school when I was a kid, just pretended to be sick and watched old reruns all day long while my mother made me Jell-O.) Poor normal Marilyn stood apart from the rest of her kin, accepted and loved by them, but always visibly different.

She never seemed to find any of this disturbing—up to and including the fact that Grandpa liked to suck blood and little Eddie slept in a coffin—but you’ve got to figure that once in a while she lay in bed at night thinking, Why are all my relatives so…you know…monstrous? How come I’m the only normal one? Why couldn’t I have had a human family like all my friends do? And maybe even, I wonder if I was switched at birth with a harpy, and my real home is a nice split-level in New Rochelle?

Don’t we all occasionally wonder why the other members of our families are so much crazier than we are? Certainly almost everyone I know does. Of course, it’s like the statistic that eighty percent of adults over thirty think they look younger than their age. A certain percentage of us must be in denial. So while you may be the sane one from your perspective, odds are your sister Sue over there thinks you’re totally cuckoo and can’t wait to leave family dinner to go complain about you to her boyfriend.

Keats Sedlak, the protagonist of this book, starts off fairly certain that she’s the only one who’s escaped her family’s particular brand of lunatic brilliance and that her only hope for continued sanity lies in making a life for herself that’s as separate from theirs as possible. But as her family pulls her back in (families have a way of doing that, don’t they?), she finds her place with them again and realizes that maybe she does belong there after all.

She might be more competent, more social, more self-aware than anyone else in her family, but deep down she’s still very much a Sedlak, just as Cousin Marilyn was, despite her blond beauty, a Munster to the bone. We can ponder the mysteries of our crazy (and sometimes monstrous) families all we want, but two facts remain: they are us and we are them.

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Reading Group Questions

Do you relate to being “the normal one” in a nutty family, or do you feel like an outlier or outsider in your more traditional family?
Were you rooting for Keats and Tom to stay together, or did their eventual breakup seem inevitable to you?
Have you ever known a couple like Larry and Eloise, who continue to live together after the decision to divorce is made? Is it possible to move on while you’re still under the same roof as an ex?
Have you been in the position of seeing one of your parents back on the dating scene? Is it inspiring? Uncomfortable? A little of both?
Keats tries to get Milton out of the house throughout the book—what has changed by the time she’s actually successful?
How does your impression of Hopkins throughout the book change when she shows up in the latter half?
Do you think that the Sedlaks are rude to or dismissive of Tom? Or is Keats projecting some of that attitude onto her family?
What do you think of the story of how Tom and Keats met? Do you think it’s charming or creepy?
What do you see happening to the Sedlaks after the book ends?