WE WERE THE MULVANEYS by Joyce Carol Oates.✔✔✔✔✔

I can't believe I read this novel in less than four days, but I just couldn't put it down. Like Mistry's "A Fine Balance" and David Adams Richards' "Mercy Among the Children" - both of which I loved - this story is a sad one, although there is redemption and closure at the end. The Mulvaneys are a happy, prosperous family of six in upstate New York, living in a beautiful three-storey home, busy with farm animals, cheerleading, playing football, visiting with friends, collecting antiques, until an incident involving Marianne, aged 17, changes the family forever. The story is told by Judd, the youngest, who was only 13 at the time of this incident, and who, at the age of 30, is now a journalist seeking to make sense of his family's history.

The novel, then, is about families - how they change their landscape over time, how siblings interact, how they keep secrets from each other, how one incident can affect everyone else.

Quotes from the novel:

Page 230
"He, Patrick Mulvaney, was this young woman's brother: they'd been brother-sister through all of their conscious lives: each was more closely related to the other genetically than either was to either of their parents. Yet he believed he scarcely knew Marianne at all. He loved her, but scarcely knew her. Members of a family who've lived together in the heated intensity of family life scarcely know one another. Life is too head-on, too close-up. That was the paradox. That was the bent, perplexing thing. Exactly the opposite of what you'd expect. For of course you never give such relationships a thought, living them. To give a thought - to take thought - is a function of dissociation, distance. You can't exercise memory until you've removed yourself from memory's source".

"Our lives are defined by the whims, caprices, cruelties of others. That genetic web, the ties of blood. It was the oldest curse, older than God. - Am I loved? Am I wanted? Who will want me, if my parents don't?"


Corinne Mulvaney( page 426) " I'm sorry not to have been a better mother but - I don't know what happened exactly - it was just something that happened, wasn't it?- no one ever decided - I never decided -..."

This is a novel I won't easily forget, and it goes on my list of all-time favorites.