Editor’s Note

Andrea Nagel

When I was a teenager my mother gave me a book of short stories called The

Family, They F**k You Up .An unusual parenting choice, you may think, but indicative of her outlook on life. She’s a realist and not swayed by romantic ideals of what we’d like the world to be like. Family, I’ve heard people say, is like nougat, lovely and sweet and sprinkled with nuts. It’s the nuts that make it interesting, if you don’t break your teeth on them.

If books, movies and series are a fairly decent reflection of reality, every family has its issues — from the richest, see Succession (it’s fabulous) to the poorest, like the Kim family in this year’s Oscar-winning film, Parasite — and every family between. Take the Burnham clan from American

Beauty, for example. The parents’ domestic breakdown culminates in Dad almost deflowering his daughter’s best friend. And who could forget the Burroughs pseudo-fictional family from

Running with Scissors. This film is about what happens when dysfunctional parents decide to send their only son to live with a psychiatrist obsessed with reading signs in his own … well, you’d need to watch the movie.

There are the Whites of Breaking Bad, the Lyon pride of Empire, the Gallaghers of Shameless, the Byrdes of Ozark and plenty more. Now there’s time to catch up with all of them under lockdown, and I have to say, I feel better about the momentary lockdown breakdowns in my own family when I look at how some of these series families operate.

So when I barricade myself in the loo for a brief respite of “alone time” because my son made a clever dick comment or to get away from the onslaught of their homework questions or because I’m just sick of everyone, I’ll do it remembering that there are plenty of families I’m lucky not to belong to. Have a happy Easter weekend and enjoy Family Day tomorrow.