Every Family Has A Story
By Julia Samuel
Published by Penguin
The psychotherapist Julia Samuel, née Guinness, comes from a family of “great privilege and multiple traumas”, she confesses in the introduction to her latest book, Every Family Has a Story. “There were so many secrets and so much left unsaid,” she writes of the Anglo-Irish banking dynasty.
Having whet our appetite for revelations of one of Britain’s most illustrious families, Samuel then offers up eight others for psychoanalysis, none quite as high-profile as hers. (She is Prince George’s godparent.) But with 30 years’ experience and as the author of two bestselling self-help books — Grief Works and This Too Shall Pass — she is perfectly positioned to poke around their antecedents. Samuel’s book sets out to discover why some families thrive in the face of adversity, while others fragment. What predicts family breakdown? And why do our families “drive us mad”?
With identities disguised, the case histories range from the aristos who grew up in a castle where the family motto was “let’s change the subject”, to the gay couple who adopted a daughter, and the butcher’s son who stormed out on Christmas Day after a row over presents. A family tree at the beginning of each chapter helps us to navigate complex relationships, while Samuel keeps the therapy groups to a more manageable size.
Her findings are full of nuggets of wisdom: Talk more and text less; Perfect families don’t exist; Family is the single most important influence on a child’s life; Young people are not fully adult until their late twenties. And how do you spot a dysfunctional family? “The people in it are secondary and everything else matters more.”
Her latest work embraces the trend for fly-on-the-wall analysis, such as the hit documentary series Couples Therapy in which weeping lovers vent their fury on the couch. Samuel’s scenarios are equally captivating. When Camilla from the castle reveals that her brother Ivo’s real father is called Robert, his elderly mother merely pats Ivo’s thigh and says: “Oh bugger. He is.” And then walks out. Or there’s the time Pam, 76, on hearing that her son’s cancer is terminal, tells his new partner: “Archie has always been a difficult child.”
Samuel is not immune to the behaviour she witnesses. She laughs, she cries, she even admonishes — “You are utterly useless with technology!” she says, when the Browne family fail to master Zoom.
At the end of their therapy sessions not every family finds redemption, but all find comfort. In the conclusion Samuel writes that “we all struggle with different versions of similar issues”, and that learning about other people’s families has helped her to process her “relationship with my own”. Perhaps next she’ll write about them.