Review - Keeping Family Secrets by Margaret K. Nelson
I received a free review copy from Netgalley. All opinions are my own.
Keeping Family Secrets: Shame and Silence in Memoirs from the 1950s is a nonfiction book that felt more like a summary of more extensive data. Nelson takes several big issues around the theme of shame and silence in the 1950s and then pulls details from a variety of memoirs to explain each issue. She addresses the institutionalization of children with disabilities, same-sex attraction among boys, unwed pregnancies, Communism, adoption, and Jewish ancestry.
This book was an interesting glimpse into the 1950s in the US. Nelson did a great job explaining why each of these issues led to shame and silence throughout the country.
Americans were after the “ideal” family, and all of these issues were perceived as detracting from that goal.
Nelson looks at individual memoirs to pull stories for each chapter of her book. It is interesting to note that most of the memoirs were written by people who grew up with these secrets in their families—and decided as adults to expose the secrets.
I felt that this book gives the reader good information. But it felt very sterile and unemotional to me. Perhaps that was the author’s intent. It also felt like a fairly dry summary of other people’s work.
I suppose my impressions of this book are tainted by my expectations. I began this book looking for a deep dive into some of these issues, seeing the emotions involved, and feeling some sort of redemption for the people who lived through these things and reclaimed their power later in life by exposing these secrets. Instead, I left with more general overview of these six issues and why they were taboos in the 1950s. I was left wanting more depth.
Keeping Family Secrets was released yesterday and is available now.
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