Aynah V. Askanas’s A Family Across Town is a candid memoir about growing up inside a secret whose effects were visible long before its facts were known. Askanas’s father, a Los Angeles pediatrician, maintained two households for more than thirty years, dividing his time between six children and two women. The memoir begins with the revelation of that double life, then returns to the family histories and childhood experiences that preceded it. This structure turns a startling discovery into a broader examination of secrecy, inheritance, and the emotional atmosphere parents create for their children.

Askanas writes in an intimate, conversational voice, building the family portrait through sharply remembered domestic details. Her mother’s cracked hands, her father’s closed bedroom door, an altered wedding photograph, and holidays celebrated on the wrong day all become evidence of a reality the children could sense but couldn’t name. Askanas captures that experience vividly: “Like corpses in an attic, the secrets emitted an odor that permeated our home, though my siblings and I didn’t know where it came from.” Her humor, often dry and self-questioning, provides necessary relief while preserving the gravity of the story.

The book’s emotional reach extends well beyond its central revelation. Askanas traces how the concealed family shaped each sibling differently, contributing to depression, aggression, substance use, perfectionism, and her own prolonged insomnia. She also places her mother’s choices within the economic and social constraints faced by women of her generation. These reflections give the memoir historical and psychological breadth. At times, Askanas presses the secret into service as an explanation for nearly every illness or misfortune, including physical disease. That interpretive consistency gives the narrative coherence, though some connections remain more speculative than demonstrable.

I think what distinguishes A Family Across Town is its willingness to hold affection and anger together. Askanas recounts her father’s deceit and cruelty while acknowledging the confidence, education, and love of reading he gave her. Her mother emerges as wounded and complicit, but also stylish, funny, devoted, and increasingly independent after the secret is exposed. The later chapters, which include a cruel dispute over paternity and the gradual softening of old judgments, deepen the book’s moral complexity. This is a clear-eyed family reckoning that finds healing in truthful testimony and in the durable bonds among those who survived the same divided home.

Pages: 256 | ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0GPDMYWJM