Like Family: Narratives of Fictive Kinship, Parenting Out of Control: Anxious Parents in Uncertain Times, and, with Rosanna Hertz, Random Families: Genetic Strangers, Sperm Donor Siblings, and the Creation of New Kin.Nelson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Keeping Family Secrets: Shame and Silence in Memoirs from the 1950s, and reported the following:
Page 99 opens in the middle of a paragraph describing the costs to a family unit – and to each of the individual members of a family –of keeping silent about the adoption of a child born to an unwed teenager. The pain of secrecy, the text suggests, echoes through the generations. The siblings of a girl whose child vanishes without ever being claimed or named, may fear that same fate for their own. The parents who have denied their daughter’s child eventually divorce. But, the next paragraph argues, the greatest cost is to a young girl herself: she must act as if nothing happened; she can never openly acknowledge her own anguish.Learn more about Keeping Family Secrets at the NYU Press website.
I love the way the Page 99 Test both works and doesn’t work for this book. It doesn’t take too much discernment after landing on that page to understand that this book explores the consequences of keeping secrets. Because the last line stops in the middle of a sentence, a reader might be tempted to turn the page, to find out what career Lorraine Dusky held and what happened t
o her. That reader might also wonder about the other names littering the page: are Carol Schaefer, Margaret Moorman, and Ellerby real people or pseudonyms? How did the author gather these first-person accounts of keeping secrets?
But many more clues would probably be needed even to know what other questions to ask. Why does the book focus on the 1940s and 1950s? Are the secrets kept then still secrets today? What other secrets beyond unwed childbirth does the book explore? Do all family secrets have the same negative consequences? Does keeping family secrets ever have positive consequences? What family secrets are kept today and how do they shape family dynamics?
The Page 99 Test: Parenting Out of Control.
The Page 99 Test: Like Family.
--Marshal Zeringue
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