The Invisibles is my series of novels about the Greene family and their discovery of .what it means to be family — stories that embrace, sibling connection, love, romance, sacrifice, and adventures with the beyond. I write family sagas in my fiction because I’m obsessed with quirky, dysfunctional families.
I blame an early reading of Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals. I read this picaresque, hilarious narrative of his family’s travels to Corfu while I was traveling as a young adult with my mother, who was busy corraling teenagers and other animals in a big rooming house in North Berkeley in the 1970s.
Something about the Durrells’ mother’s lackadaisical parenting style, resulting in a menagerie of people and pets through their household, rang a bell for me. At the time, in our home were five teenagers, counting me, my brother, and his three friends who had been adopted by my mother because their parents couldn’t control them. The boys inhabited the largest bedroom in the house, which they painted black with neon-glowing symbols. Several snakes, an armadillo, and an iguana inhabited the room with them, and were strictly forbidden from appearing anywhere else in the house (especially the snakes). Undoubtedly, there were contraband substances in the house, though we hoped to quarantine them as well to the black room.
Growing up, I ran a bit wild, in the manner of young Gerald Durrell searching for his wild creatures. My island was our San Pedro neighborhood on the hill, and my search was more for fun, biking, hopscotch, and tetherball matches than to investigate wild animals. Because my parents were locked in an ongoing crisis brought about by my father’s noisy tyranny and bipolar swings, I had a kind of freedom unknown to most of today’s closely observed and guarded children. I could have dropped off the edge of our ravine or ditched myself and my bike on the side of the road, and my parents might have learned about it from a neighbor or passing motorist six or seven hours later. I could ride my bike into the twilight, despite being told to be home by dinner because they were too distracted to mete out major consequences. My brother and I sometimes climbed up onto the roof to lament our chaotic parents. Nobody seemed to notice us up there.
When they finally divorced, my mother took me and my brother to Berkeley, where I was already studying at UC. She bought a succession of houses, all with rooms for strangers, and so we never knew who would turn up for dinner. Once we accommodated twelve overnight guests for a week, friends of my friends. I barely knew them, but by week’s end, they were cooking for us.
The idea of recreating my chaotic and carelessly creative family has always appealed to me. When my dear brother passed away a few years ago, I felt myself still in touch with him in a mysterious way — an everpreesent connection I know will never be gone. Once you have loved someone so dearly, you never totally lose them.
Just days after his death, I began to write the first book, a story about the Greene family and its creative chaos, its dissensions and delights. I traveled them to my favorite place (besides the one where i life, California) to Italy. Thus was born my family saga, The Invisibles. Saffron, Elinor, and Betsy acquired new family members in the way we did when we moved to Berkeley — randomly and with joyful carelessness. Thus Michael, Tonio, Daniel, Lara, and others gravitated to their messily happy family. And the cast keeps growing. I write family sagas because family as a concept and a practice, keeps growing in my mind and heart. I want to keep all my family, dead or alive, very present in my life and my world!
Because I write this on July 1, I wish my late brother a happy heavenly birthday!
