The Family Snitch
A Daughter’s Memoir of Truth and Lies
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- $29.99
Publisher Description
A Wall Street Journal reporter confronts the most difficult source she’s ever encountered, her own father, in this unsparing interrogation of the ways we deceive ourselves and others
A stunning debut, perfect for fans of searing family memoirs that lift the veil of childhood, as in books by Nicole Chung and Ashley C. Ford
Francesca's parents represented opposing world-views. Her mother always slid her way out of questions about the past, saying only “My life started when you were born.” Her dad, an absent bodybuilder, loved telling stories about his seemingly larger-than-life past. He said he would tell her anything she wanted to know. But more often than not, it was a total lie. When Francesa was 9, he went to prison, and her mother, the grounding center of Francesca's world, moved her half a continent away...
The first in her family to attend college, The Family Snitch started as a youthful experiment in journalistic investigation, as Francesca began to uncover her father's secret criminal past. But in her increasingly dogged pursuit of the truth at any cost, was she just selling everybody out?
In her thought-provoking exploration, Francesca also interrogates her own relationship to the truth, finding that she trusts almost no one and refuses to believe anything that can’t be backed by hard evidence. She turns to experts on memory and psychology, in search of someone to help explain the secrets kept between parents and children, and the inheritances they leave us in the fallout of their choices. She pulls on the threads that lead her back through the forms that came before this one: theater and film, Greek tragedy and myth.
The result is a page-turning memoir that is also an artful work of literature with enduring appeal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Wall Street Journal reporter Fontana attempts to resolve the "confusion and hurt" caused by her father's long absences during her childhood in her ruminative debut. When she was a student at the University of Oregon in 2016, Fontana proposed "a journalistic examination of father's criminal past" for her honors thesis, hoping to get at the truth behind the blustery man she saw only on weekends, who went to prison when she was nine for reasons she never knew. Grant money enabled her to fly back to Chicago, where she'd lived before leaving in 2005 with her mother and stepfather. She soon uncovered her father's involvment in a scheme he hatched with Chicago police to steal money and cocaine from drug dealers. She interviewed attorneys and family members, whose insistence on privacy forms the account's most interesting tension: between a desire for disclosure and doubt about its worth. Along the way, Fontana thwarts readers' expectations of a happy ending by noting that she's permanently estranged from her father and her own marriage ended during the writing of the book. Though her prose is polished, labored metaphors—especially an extended one in which she describes her mind as an office and her memories as files—undercut the narrative's power somewhat. Still, this is a memorable inquiry into the legacy of a father's sins.
