In the blended household in which she landed, her new family soon “began to splinter along biological lines,” with blood siblings forming alliances in what would become a long cold war. As Kimball writes, her sensitivity finely attuned, it took her time to realize that exploring her mother’s psyche would force her still-living mother to “scratch at a wound that’s probably been open since childhood.” Just as sensitively, the author examines the effects of divorce on uncomprehending children and, more damagingly, the endless psychological battles surrounding custody. “What I wanted,” she writes, “is to clear away the muck: to point to a date on a calendar and say this led to that to watch a video and deconstruct the moments that led to our family’s collapse and its aftermath.” That aftermath included institutionalization, disintegration, and recrimination. In adulthood, the author has tried to puzzle out events. Of course, the suicide attempt, born of unsuccessfully managed bipolar disorder, clouded the lives of Kimball and her siblings, who were very young when it occurred.
“The Secret,” the opening act of the book, pairs a charming illustrative style, marked by bold-line geometries and little handwritten pointers (“Essential sandwich ingredients,” “Weird, secret storage room”), with a startling first sentence: “My mom was thirty-one when she decided to take her own life.” That desperate act sets in motion the collapse of a seemingly ordinary family-though, of course, no family is truly ordinary. Intensely candid debut memoir by illustrator and writer Kimball.
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