In episode 25 of The Bookshelf of Jennifer Morrison, the actress and director talks to Chrysta Bilton about Normal Family: On Truth, Love, and How I Met My 35 Siblings, a memoir Morrison read in a single flight. Bilton explains how a story she had carried since she was 17 finally became a book.
A family like no other
The book opens with a reunion: Bilton, in her thirties, about to meet two dozen of her half-brothers and half-sisters for the first time, “like speed dating with half siblings”. It then goes back in time. Her mother, a gay woman in 1980s Los Angeles, wanted children at a time when she knew no one openly gay doing so. She met a strikingly handsome man in a hair salon and offered to pay him to become the father. Years later, Bilton learned that this man, whom she had grown up calling Dad, had also become one of the most prolific donors at a California sperm bank.
Her mother was loving and larger than life, but also an alcoholic and a drug user, caught up in pyramid schemes, with fortunes that rose and collapsed. At 17, Bilton came home to find her mother leaving for rehab, with $20 on the counter, a 12-year-old sister and a house full of animals to look after.
Writing the truth about someone you love
Bilton first tried to tell the story as a screenplay, in secret, for years. Reading The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls convinced her it was a book. She only felt ready in her mid-thirties. To hold herself to it, she sold the book on a proposal with three sample chapters, and her editor at Little, Brown gave her two years.
The hardest part was her mother. Bilton gave her a softened first version to read; her mother broke down over the first page because her dog was described as “pudgy”. To Bilton’s surprise, her mother did not mind the stories about drugs. What she could not accept were the passages about money troubles and the family tragedy she had kept secret. After months of negotiation, the book came out, and her mother now loves to hear who has read it.
Choosing health, one fork at a time
Bilton speaks openly about the turning points that let her break the patterns she grew up with: recovering from an eating disorder in college, getting sober at 22, and learning to stop choosing partners who were bad for her. Morrison admires how her resilience turned a chaotic childhood into a book full of humour and tenderness.
Her advice to writers echoes Maslow’s pyramid: build a healthy, stable life first, and the creative work at the top will follow. And don’t be afraid of the truth, she adds: people love you more for what you have been through than for the image you present.