Penelope Lively: Family Album

Every family is charged with small acts of brutality. One child will flail about with scissors, another must bite or shove, and there’s always the pulling of hair or the tearing of skin. Someone will decide to experiment with matches or lock the door of a dark closet and abandon the sister cowering inside. A grown-up might pretend to be a lion and roar so hard that a child wets himself in panic. Banal but terrifying things happen. Then we forget them. Somehow, though, they don’t forget us. Memories lie buried, yet remain forceful enough to shape our lives. In its infinite dimensions, this is the subject Penelope Lively, the British author of more than two dozen children’s books and numerous adult novels, has explored throughout her long and impressive career. In her haunting new novel, “Family Album,” the act of forgetting is as strange and interesting as the power of remembering.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/29/books/review/Browning-t.html)