"Family Drama" | Reviewed by Pat Sainz

In Rebecca Fallon’s debut novel, twins Sebastian and Viola, spend their lives from age 7 through their 20s inescapably longing to know their deceased actress mother and resenting their father’s refusal to let them know about her.

         “Family Drama” is set mainly in Harvard between 1997 and 2013. When the twins were 7-years-old, they watched as their mother, Susan Bliss, was buried at sea in the Atlantic Ocean following a terminal illness. They are confused; their father Al is crying and is inattentive to them.  A Los Angeles friend of their mother provides the only comfort to young Viola following the service.  She never forgets him.

        Susan Bliss, who played a witch in a small-town play for tourists in Salem, Massachusetts, met Al during a performance. Al was a Harvard history teacher. Soon after their marriage, Susan had a chance to perform in a popular televised soap opera based in Los Angeles. 

       Al expects her to quit work after their twins are born; she doesn’t. Susan has become a soap opera star under an assumed name. She loves her family but won’t give up her career. Al won’t move; his life in Boston is all that he has known and he is focused on getting tenure. 

        Susan travels back and forth from Los Angeles almost weekly until she gets cancer when Sebastian and Viola are starting elementary school. When she dies, Al destroys all the tapes of his wife’s work.  He never had a conversation with his children about her life or her work. They never know until they are in high school that their mother was famous.      

         For years Sebastian and Viola suffer the absence of their mother. Only an aunt, from whom Al is estranged, talks about their mother years after she has died. When Viola moves to Cambridge for college, she encounters Orsen, the man who played a significant role in her mother’s life. Orsen is 20 years older than Viola and a world-famous movie star.  She doesn’t care, nor does he. Their time together is secret since the tabloid reporters would certainly pursue them and make much of Orsen’s former relationship with her mother.

         Sebastian and Viola seek their own ways to come to terms with the holes left in their lives by their mother’s early death and by their father’s reticence to provide meaningful memories of their lives as a family. As the twins mature, they begin to look outside of their own needs and seek to understand how their father’s life has unraveled in a completely different way that he had imagined.

        Themes of family, loss, love, tragedy, and regret permeate the story of “Family Drama.” Fallon has written a debut novel that is moving and reflects beautifully the questioning and upheaval following the death of a loved one.

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