Tales From Broken Homes

Leo Tolstoy famously once said, “All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1878). When I first read this line, I took it to mean that happy families are boring. They are those families you see on sitcoms from the 70s and 80s, the Bradys or the Huxtables, comedically cheerful slices of americana that, in 20-30 minutes, introduce a problem, solve it, and ends with everyone happily hugging each other and sharing a newly learned lesson about life. They might be entertaining, for a little while at least, but they are seldom compelling. They are not the stories that sink into your mind and plague you with delicious thoughts and wonderings well past the ending of the episode, the short story, or the novel. Those stories belong to unhappy, dysfunctional families like the one seen in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. People in unhappy families tend to make more interesting and emotionally charged choices than decisions made by individuals in happier, more wholesome environments. In this thesis, I have tried to capture the energy produced by unhappy and dysfunctional families within a series of short stories and flash pieces. Each utilizes speculative fiction to explore relationships between family members, mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers and to see how a sense of disquietness and sorrow can twist a narrative into something captivating.