"Why Do I Love These People?": Understanding, Surviving, and Creating Your Own Family

"Why Do I Love These People?": Understanding, Surviving, and Creating Your Own Family

Po Bronson

Language: English

Pages: 400

ISBN: 0812972422

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


We all have an imaginary definition of a great family. We imagine what it would be like to belong to such a family. No fights over the holidays. No getting on one another’s nerves. Respect for individual identity. Mutual support, without being intrusive. So many people believe they are disqualified from having a better family experience, primarily because they compare their own family with the mythic ideal, and their reality falls short. Is that a fair standard to judge against?”

In the pages of Why Do I Love These People?, Po Bronson takes us on an extraordinary journey.

It begins on a river in Texas, where a mother gets trapped underwater and has to bargain for her own life and that of her kids.

Then, a father and his daughter return to their tiny rice-growing village in China, hoping to rekindle their love for each other inside the walls of his childhood home.

Next, a son puts forth a riddle, asking us to understand what his first experience of God has to do with his Mexican American mother.

Every step–and every family–on this journey is real.

Calling upon his gift for powerful nonfiction narrative and philosophical insight, Bronson explores the incredibly complicated feelings that we have for our families. Each chapter introduces us to two people–a father and his son, a daughter and her mother, a wife and her husband–and we come to know them as intimately as characters in a novel, following the story of their relationship as they struggle resiliently through the kinds of hardships all families endure.

Some of the people manage to save their relationship, while others find a better life only after letting the relationship go. From their efforts, the wisdom in this book emerges. We are left feeling emotionally raw but grounded–and better prepared to love, through both hard times and good time.

In these twenty mesmerizing stories, we discover what is essential and elemental to all families and, in doing so, slowly abolish the fantasies and fictions we have about those we fight to stay connected to.

In Why Do I Love These People?, Bronson shows us that we are united by our yearnings and aspirations: Family is not our dividing line, but our common ground.

From the Hardcover edition.

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called when Charlie was headed home. She was distraught. “You wouldn't recognize the place,” she cried. “Charlie, it's awful.” “We'll get it fixed up, Susan.” “The wallpaper has been peeled from the walls. Two windows are broken. There's vomit in the carpet, and the couches have been peed on. Who pees on a couch, Charlie? The electricity is off—I'm sure they didn't pay the bill. And cockroaches, Charlie. It's infested. I can't sleep here.” He felt violated—God, his dream home! His future!—but

for him. So Doug waffled. Wendy put up with Doug's indecision for about two years. She let Doug play with the baby now and then, even let him take the baby out to the country one weekend. “My heart wanted to be with Wendy and Gabe,” he said forlornly, looking back at his inaction. “But there were a lot of people back then telling me that what we had done was simply not right, and the professed ‘right’ thing to do was to stop the relationship, not continue it. That was the atmosphere all around

Sojourner Truth Presbyterian, and does get to sing there occasionally. She is fifty-five years old, but going on old age. “I'm back in the ghetto again,” Karen remarked. Jarralynne piped up. “Mom, this is not the ghetto. These are very nice apartments.” “I miss the cable at your house.” “It's the same ninety-five-dollar-a-month cable as we have there. Both bills are charged to my card.” Karen has trouble being appreciative—she can't help it, because Karen sees her daughter having the life

single link dangling down. For a few years the farm was dormant. Then a family arrived. Two grandparents, their adult son-in-law, and his two boys, one eleven years old, the other only four. The four-year-old boy found the elm right away, and he felt a kinship for this grand old being with its horrific scar and its curious dangling link. By then the bark had started to grow back, and it nearly met itself as it reached over the iron links. This boy, too, had a scar: His mother and his sister had

eventually, to forgive him: because she agreed with his new interpretation. In fact, it was very similar to her own views, which were based on neuroscience: When you touch someone new, a hit of the hormone oxytocin is released into your bloodstream, and it is, literally, a high. Andrew had misinterpreted the high as love and had assumed the activator of that high was his soul mate. Julie never believed in soul mates or even understood their appeal. To Julie, real love was something else entirely,

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