Review: Family Matters by Lance Lee

In a memoir that does double duty as a multi-generational history of dysfunction and the effort to define a life shaped by deceptions, Lance Lee unmasks the myths his parents clung to in Family Matters: dreams I couldn’t share and how a dysfunctional family became America’s Darling, The Addams Family.

Lee and his sister, Linda, endured a turbulent childhood controlled by their father David “Gar” Levy, a self-absorbed, generally distant, often emotionally abusive patriarch. A high-powered advertising and television network executive, Gar created the sitcom, “The Addams Family,” which Lee believes Gar infused with his own parents’ dysfunction and its continuation in the Levy household.

Lee and Linda’s mother, Lucille Wilds, a stunning beauty queen, and the first supermodel before the term was even coined, was mostly helpless against her husband’s cruelty. Operating inside the fallacy of normality they both inherited, Gar and Lucille presented the Levy’s to the world as the perfect family, manipulating or blatantly ignoring dark secrets, infidelities, and assorted public and private humiliations that threatened to expose the myth they worked tirelessly to protect.

Throughout the memoir, Lee recounts elaborate ancestral histories and examines the ways culture, religious discrimination, the promise of the American Dream, and the discovery that truth is an illusion contributed to his tumultuous upbringing. He relied on his father’s journals, accounts that very often differed from the way Lee and Linda remembered them, revealing how Gar, under the veneer of privilege and success, reinvented events to satisfy his delusions. Interspersed throughout the chronology and histories are Lee’s digressions into philosophical reflections on memory, reality, nature, and the irresistible lure of wealth and fame.

An accomplished poet, novelist, and university professor, Lee is a masterful storyteller who presents both historical facts and introspective meditations in vaulted, lofty, and often poetic prose. The breadth and depth of his knowledge across the disciplines shape and inform his presentation of actual events and his intense contemplations, sometimes written in an almost stream-of-consciousness style. There is no doubt he is a brilliant thinker and gifted writer, but the tangential nature of some sections and the surprising amount of punctuation errors seem out of place for a writer of Lee’s caliber.

Similarly, the book’s full title promises to divulge the secrets of a complicated family whose history became the material for a popular American sitcom featuring a mysterious, sort of ghoulish clan who see themselves as perfectly normal and for whom nothing is more important than family: in many ways, the book fulfills its pledge. However, major dramatic events do not unfold until hundreds of pages into the book, and many of those pages are devoted to ideas and people that don’t seem to have much to do with the memoir’s stated purpose, losing some focus on the family’s remarkable story.

That said, this is an engrossing examination of a uniquely Hollywood family that in some way helped shape popular culture. Closing with a series of Lee’s beautifully crafted, narrative poems, Family Matters is an evocatively written account of the very human side of show business.

Book Links