43 pages • 1 hour read
Tarryn FisherThe Wrong Family
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Illusion of Perfection
Content Warning: This section of the guide references mental illness, substance use disorders, sexual misconduct, and kidnapping.
Winnie Crouch expends great effort to cause her family and home to appear perfect to all her friends and neighbors. Her obsession ranges from “fixing” a working doorbell so that its chime will sound more pleasant to insisting that the family eat vegetarian. She selected the house on Turlin Street without consulting Nigel because she wanted to create an impression for her friends: “And, most importantly, her friends were jealous. A house on Greenlake! Why, that’s almost as good as a house on Lake Washington! They’d all said so, which had brought a deep flush of pleasure to Winnie” (30). Most tellingly, it emerges that she at one point kidnapped a child to fulfill her idea of the perfect family. Winnie struggled to become pregnant but saw becoming mother as an integral part of the life she had planned for herself, so she took the baby of an unhoused teenage mother, Josalyn.
Winnie’s crime reveals the hollowness of the upper-middle-class family life to which Winnie aspires. The Wrong Family takes place in a well-to-do neighborhood where there is great pressure to conform to a particular public image. For example, Winnie cultivates a diverse group of friends, takes care to recycle and consume organic foods, and gives money to those who are unhoused. However, the most intense pressure the characters face concerns an idealized vision of family life, and as soon as this comes into conflict with Winnie’s supposed liberal commitments, she abandons any compassion for Josalyn to fulfill her own desires. The novel implies that Winnie is not unique in this respect; rather, the seemingly perfect society in which she moves is superficial at best and exploitative at worst.
Nor are marginalized people like Josalyn the only ones who suffer as a result. Winnie’s perfectionism puts enormous strain on her family, encouraging secrecy and sweeping problems under the rug. Nigel, for example, leads a double life in which he is devoted husband and father at home while conducting an affair on the side. He and Winnie try to keep their discord a secret from friends and family but are unsuccessful at preventing Sam from recognizing their struggles, exacerbating his own stress. The image Winnie cultivates is also one that flatly denies the existence of issues like mental illness or addiction within her own family—particularly in her twin brother, Dakota. Dakota’s wife, Manda, reveals the extent of the family’s denial by saying, “God, I know how you guys worship your brother, but he’s not been right for a while. No one wants to acknowledge that” (225). Winnie’s failure to recognize the severity of Dakota’s substance use and schizophrenia is partly responsible for the violence of the novel’s climax, which results in the deaths of four people, including Dakota himself.
The Weight of Secrets
Everyone living in the house on Turlin Street is weighed down by the secrets that they are keeping, often to the detriment of their relationships. Winnie is plagued by guilt and shame about the time she abducted Josalyn’s baby and accidentally smothered or crushed it. She never faced legal consequences, but the personal toll of carrying a secret like that has made her deeply depressed and feeds her oppressively controlling mothering: By raising Sam perfectly, she feels she can atone for what she did to Josalyn’s child. Nigel shares Winnie’s secret and helped her cover it up at the time, but the stress of that secret leads to many fights, with Nigel frustrated that Winnie can’t move past her guilt. In one of these arguments, Winnie replies to Nigel, saying, “You’re tired of it? Oh my God, Nigel. It was the worst night of my life and you’re tired of it?” (80). Nigel has his own secrets as well. He has been seeing Dulce, a woman he knows from work, on the side; he also keeps a hidden stash of whiskey in the house, although this is an “open” secret. Fisher implies that Nigel’s infidelity and substance use flow from the unhappiness of his marriage, suggesting that secrecy compounds on itself over time.
Samuel’s situation underscores this point. Sam suffers not only the secondhand effects of Winnie’s guilt but also the sense that his parents are hiding a secret from him: that he was adopted. Although wrong in the particulars, Sam is right that his parents are lying to him, and that intuition contributes to the disconnect he feels from his mother and father. He responds with secrets of his own, stealing Oxycontin from his parents’ bathroom and saving up money to run away. Because he has grown up in an atmosphere of secrecy, he does not feel comfortable sharing his concerns with his parents; instead, he tries to address his problems by himself, but his young age means that he is not equipped to do so.
In contrast to the Crouches, Juno has already lost everything as a result of her lies and deceptions. Once a therapist, she was sent to prison for having an illicit relationship with a client, which also destroyed her relationship with her husband and stepsons. Juno now lives covertly in the crawl space of the Crouches’ house, a living embodiment of secrecy and its consequences whose ever-increasing interference in the Crouches’ lives symbolically suggests the impossibility of keeping secrets quiet forever.
The Role of the Observer
The Wrong Family is a domestic thriller that centers on family relationships, but Winnie’s troubles are not as private as she believes. Though the Crouches are unaware of Juno’s presence in the home, she is deeply entangled in their lives from the start. Having moved into the crawl space in search of shelter, food, and medicine, Juno quickly begins to eavesdrop on the events in the house. The more she learns, the more she moves from observer to participant. When snooping through the family’s personal effects, Juno discovers Winnie’s journal and becomes intrigued by the evidence of Winnie’s depression. She later overhears Nigel make a remark about “steal[ing] someone’s infant” (80), which sparks Juno’s investigation into Sam’s parentage and her conclusion that he was Josalyn’s son. From this point on, she meddles actively in the family’s lives, taunting Winnie with reminders of her crime and eventually bringing Terry Russel to the Crouches’ home.
Juno justifies her interference on the grounds that she is trying to protect Sam and reveal a crime. However, the novel’s conclusion suggests that Juno only made the tragedy worse by involving an outsider; Terry dies at Dakota’s hands, and the wrong that Winnie did is never redressed. Furthermore, Juno’s interest in the family follows a well-established pattern of voyeurism: Throughout her life, she has found emotional gratification delving into the affairs of other people. Nor is she the only one. Questioning why Nigel would look up the names of missing children, Winnie reflects that she herself once did the same: “She wanted to see [the parents’] hurt, to experience their pain alongside them like she had some part in it” (144). Winnie’s thoughts imply that there is a fine line between empathy and voyeurism while raising questions about the position of readers: The appeal of vicariously experiencing a fictional crime, the novel suggests, is perhaps not so different from the appeal of vicariously experiencing a real one.
More broadly, Juno and Winnie’s experiences suggest that observing is rarely (if ever) a truly passive activity: People choose what to look at, and the experience of looking changes them. This explains why Juno is never satisfied merely to watch events unfold, as the mere fact of looking has already implicated her in them. The novel therefore sounds a cautionary note about taking an interest in others’ affairs.
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