Familial interactions can be remarkably cruel, and author Rebecca Wait (Cry Havoc; The Followers) is one of the leading chroniclers of such relationships. I'm Sorry You Feel That Way is a merciless, quietly funny dissection of a family in which love has curdled over decades into something more like a record of grievances.
The novel's inciting incident is the death of Katy, the eccentric aunt whose schizophrenia is a story carefully edited by Celia, who casts herself as the victim of her sister's illness. Katy's funeral reconvenes Celia's three adult children: Michael, the favorite son who has his mother's talent for emotional manipulation; and twins Alice and Hanna. Alice is throttled by anxiety, while Hanna bolted years earlier to the other side of the world. Celia is a woman who has spent years converting failures early in life into complaints and control. Her personal tragedies don't excuse what she's done to her children.
Wait's writing is precisely calibrated, sharp without being satirical. The most devastating family dynamics leave no visible marks, the emotional gut punches cumulating with repetition rather than through melodrama, as shown in this retort by Hanna when Alice asks her if she's ever wished she wasn't a twin: "Actually, I've never really thought of myself as a twin."
When the final reckoning arrives, the full weight of everything that has not been said in this family over the last 30 years--every apology withheld, every feeling seen as an imposition, every child who learned to make themselves small--is profoundly felt. --Elizabeth DeNoma, executive editor, DeNoma Literary Services, Seattle, Wash.