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    Did You Ever Have A Family
    Did You Ever Have A Family
    Did You Ever Have A Family
    Audiobook6 hours

    Did You Ever Have A Family

    Written by Bill Clegg

    Narrated by Bill Clegg

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD, MAN BOOKER PRIZE, PEN/ROBERT W. BINGHAM PRIZE, AND ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL FOR EXCELLENCE • AN ALA NOTABLE BOOK

    Hailed as “masterly” by The New York Times Book Review, “a brilliantly constructed debut set in the aftermath of catastrophic loss” (2015 Man Booker Prize Judges).

    The stunning debut novel from bestselling author Bill Clegg is a magnificently powerful story about a circle of people who find solace in the least likely of places as they cope with a horrific tragedy.

    On the eve of her daughter’s wedding, June Reid’s life is upended when a shocking disaster takes the lives of her daughter, her daughter’s fiancé, her ex-husband, and her boyfriend, Luke—her entire family, all gone in a moment. June is the only survivor.

    Alone and directionless, June drives across the country, away from her small Connecticut town. In her wake, a community emerges, weaving a beautiful and surprising web of connections through shared heartbreak.

    From the couple running a motel on the Pacific Ocean where June eventually settles into a quiet half-life, to the wedding’s caterer whose bill has been forgotten, to Luke’s mother, the shattered outcast of the town—everyone touched by the tragedy is changed as truths about their near and far histories finally come to light.

    Elegant and heartrending, and one of the most accomplished fiction debuts of the year, Did You Ever Have a Family is an absorbing, unforgettable tale that reveals humanity at its best through forgiveness and hope. At its core is a celebration of family—the ones we are born with and the ones we create.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateSep 1, 2015
    ISBN9781442385276
    Author

    Bill Clegg

    Bill Clegg is a literary agent in New York and the author of the bestselling memoirs Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man and Ninety Days. The author of the novels Did You Ever Have a Family and The End of the Day, he has written for the New York Times, Lapham’s Quarterly, New York magazine, The Guardian, and Harper’s Bazaar.

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    Reviews for Did You Ever Have A Family

    4/5

    476 ratings58 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Nice premise. Took too long to get to the point though. Would have also been an easier listen if there were different narrators due to the frequent shift in characters.
    • 4/5
      Too many characters
    • 4/5
      What an intriguing tale. Told from multiple points of view--primarily two women, each of whom has lost their grown child in an explosion that took place in a small Connecticut town, but also by a teenager, townspeople, women who run on a motel on the Pacific Northwest--it is in many ways the story of the town itself. Fulltime residents are essentially the servant class to the wealthy part-timers who come from the city to stay for long weekends, but not to put down roots. Outsiders are begrudgingly tolerated (if not welcomed) and people who are different are barely tolerated at all. But times are changing, and the town is contrasted with the coastal community to which several of the characters are drawn. There is plenty of mystery here: was the explosion an accident? Who was responsible? How do you recover from devastating loss? Beautifully told, I was fascinated by each character's voice and they linger in my memory, as I wonder what happens next.
    • 3/5
      Note that the title is not a question -- it is more the beginning to an anecdote that begins innocently enough, but soon finds itself on unstable ground. The main character, June Reid had a family, but they are all tragically taken from her in a gas explosion on the morning of her daughter's wedding. Daughter Lolly, fiance Will, ex-husband Adam and her current boyfriend Luke were all in the house and she was out on the lawn when it happened. It makes you wince just to imagine it. But the story is parceled out bit-by-bit which makes it readable rather than completely lamentable. Various characters have a say: June, Luke's mother Lydia, Will's parents and a variety of others who seem very incidental until you realize just how tightly woven the human race can be in an interesting case of 6 degrees of separation. The tragedy takes place in CT, and June flees immediately after the last funeral, west to Washington to grieve and try to make sense of the whole thing. Some characters and their stories remain grounded in the small CT town, and others are added to the mix in Moclips, the tiny community on the edge of the Pacific Ocean. Through the journey, the story is revealed and it has some captivating twists. Tough subject matter, but the overall tale of healing and facing reality is uplifting. One of the characters, Cissy, reflects: "Rough as life can be, I know in my bones we are supposed to stick around and play our part...Someone down the line might need to know you got through it. Or maybe someone you won't see coming will need you...And it might be you never know the part you played, what it meant to someone to watch you make your way each day. Maybe someone or something is watching us all make our way. I don't think we get to know why. (p. 291)
    • 5/5
      Very sad, but more subtle than I expected from the harrowing premise. Tucked into a tragic story are several sweet connections and meditations on making the most of a life.
    • 4/5
      Looking at other reviews, I see that many others struggled with how to rate this book. The struggle derives largely from the formula Clegg used to construct the book.
      The book's many chapters are all headed with a name. Some of the names are of characters already introduced in the book, others are characters not previously mentioned. Sometimes the chapters are written in first person, other times in third. In every case, much of the information to be derived from the chapters comes from interpritting inplecations of statements made by the character whose name heads the chapter. Of course, there are more direct statements as well. Through the first few of these chapters, the reader has to do a lot of work just to figure out what is going on in this unusual structure and then to figure out who is who when character names are used within the chapters and as chapter headings.
      In spite of the difficulty that I initially felt as I moved through the book, in the end I enjoyed both the format and the content of the novel.
      Beyond the format issue are the plot, theme, setting, character development and other aspects of the novel. For these, this is an amazing novel for a first time author.
      The story is skillfully crafted and kept me engaged. I'd almost all it "a page turner."
      The novel works on two levels. On the first, it is a story of how people live through and handle enormous traedy, especially within the context and background of the life they have lived before the tragedy occurred. Clegg really does a good job of showing how a character's "present" is the product of his or her "past."
      On the second level, the story is really a kind of detective story. And here, too, there are two things to sleuth. First, understanding the characters, and second, finding out what actually caused the tragedy upon which the story is based..
      All told, this is a really good book. The difficulty of the format keeps me, and other reviewers, from giving it five stars, but it would have been pretty easy for me to rate it higher. It is a good book, a story well told, and a memorable reading experience.
    • 5/5
      It's tragic. A dramatic device that provides a plot and I was curious as hell...and intrigued as can be!

      This is what excites us about books that begin with a sorrowful bang. Grief is sad. How did these particular characters respond?

      Favorite quote:
      “Someone down the line might need to know you got through it. Or maybe someone you won’t see coming will need you. Like a kid who asks you to let him help clean motel rooms. Or some ghost who drifts your way, hungry. And good people might even ask you to marry them. And it might be you never know the part you played, what it meant to someone to watch you make your way each day. Maybe someone or something is watching us all make our way. I don’t think we get to know why. It is, as Ben would say about most of what I used to worry about, none of my business.”





    • 5/5
      This was such a touching and emotional book. It's the study of a woman at the center of a tragedy as well as others touched by her or the tragedy.I would not have read this book if I had been told the way it is presented; I like my stories logical and linear (although I'm okay with two stories with a common element that flow with time). This book gave nearly as much time to those barely at the center of the drama as it did to June, the most impacted. But, despite this disclaimer, I was intrigued and mesmerized by the story. There were so many characters presented briefly who I feel I completely understood.A great book.
    • 4/5
      Occasionally trick-sy but overall terrific. There's enough aggregated good stuff in this novel to carry it through despite my early misgivings that we readers were being manipulated and coerced through the story. Ultimately I think he pulls off a delicate balance between affectation and and genuine emotional affect.
    • 3/5
      I did not love this book, though I recognize it is well-written and original. I was expecting something so spectacular that letdown may have been inevitable.
    • 5/5
      At its core this is a novel about family, all different types but people who are drawn together in missed opportunities, misunderstanding and the circumstances of life. It is a terribly sad book as we witness people’s responses to a tragic accident the night before a wedding when the novel’s characters lose a daughter, two lose a son and must figure out how to go on. Well written, tender and thoughtful. Hold your family close and be grateful to have them.
    • 3/5
      A substantial book about women, good and bad marriages, and unfathomable loss. The number of narrators was confusing and caused me to feel I was missing some of the connections.
    • 3/5
      I was not overly impressed by this much-praised book. I heard the author interviewed on a NY Times books podcast and both he and the story drew my interest and provoked me to borrow the book from my local library. The book has received a lot of praise and award nominations and so maybe my expectations were very high. Perhaps it's my age or early dementia, but I found the cast of characters and interweaving stories to be a little too complicated and disjointed for a large part of the book. The multiple-narrators approach, although contributing positively in some ways, also seemed to me to add an element of complexity that detracted from the overall story. Maybe there were too many voices? I reckon Clegg's editor should have advised him to simplify the plot and focus more on building up the depth of individual characters. It probably didn't help that I'm not a big fan of mystery in novels. It was apparent very early on in the book that there was more to the story of the family tragedy than was being revealed, but the book didn't make me feel as though I needed to find out those details. Towards the end of the book it seemed as though the story was continuing just to wrap up those loose ends.
    • 4/5
      June has lost everyone important to her in a house fire – her daughter, her daughter’s finance, her ex-husband and her boyfriend Luke. She is left stunned and numb. Her way of dealing with her grief is to get out of town and away from everyone she knows.June is not the only person dealing with grief and loss. Luke’s mother, Lydia, is dealing with the loss of her son in her own way. She’s a pariah in her own town for the fact that Luke is the product of her affair with a black man while she was married to a white man. She’s white too so it was obvious when Luke was born that Lydia’s husband was not the father. To everyone in town, this is evidence that she is a loose woman. Feeling alone, she strikes up a friendship with Winton, the con-artist who keeps calling wanting her to send him a $745 processing fee so he can send her the three million dollar lottery payout she has supposedly won.The narrative alternates between several characters whose lives all intersect in some way. All of the characters are well-developed. In addition to exploring how different people deal with grief, there is the mystery of what caused the house to explode. Did Luke cause the explosion like everyone assumes or was it something else?This book was a selection for my book club [side note – I joined a book club at my church that has been meeting for FORTY years] and it turned out to be a great choice. We talked a lot about how both June and Lydia processed their grief. And why did they make the choices they made in life, both before and after the fire? We also all agreed that there were so many characters that it was hard to keep them all straight at first. Some people made notes to keep track of who was who. Not a bad idea!This is definitely not a feel-good novel but it is a wonderful exploration of grief and family.
    • 4/5
      Four people die in a house fire and June is the only survivor and really there are no survivors. June leaves in the car which is all she has left and ends up on the west coast in Washington on the Pacific Ocean. The death of these four people brings a web of connections together. The story is told by alternating perspectives and examines grief, loss and guilt. I enjoy books that examine grief and loss but this really is a book more about guilt and regret. This book has made a lot of lists but hasn't won any prizes yet including the Booker Man long list. It is currently on the International Dublin long list. I listened to the audio which was read by the author. This was a mistake. The author can read, he reads fine but that's just it, he is reading and he has a male voice and it never changes. There are many perspectives, mostly women characters and it is hard to keep track of who is the current narrator because they all sound the same. Still I will have to say I enjoyed the book but the reason it was so enjoyable is that when June drives to Washington she ends up at the Pacific Ocean. I just returned from Washington where this book takes place; Aberdeen, Lake Quinault, Gray's Harbor, Ocean Beaches. What a nice surprise. I had no idea that I had started a book that was set in places I had been. I walked along the shore at Aberdeen, the beach at Ocean Beaches and I stayed at the Lodge on Lake Quinault. Every year I get a calendar delivered to me from the Quinault Indians which have a part in the book.
    • 3/5
      This is the debut novel for Bill Clegg. It's a novel about family and how each individual deals with their unbearable loss of a member. The setting is a small town in Connecticut where a tragedy occurs. It's emotional and moving as the author shows how affected people were to those involved in the disaster. There were family members who eventually find forgiveness and hope.This novel has a lot of characters and it was confusing for me to keep them straight. After putting the novel down, when I returned to it, I'd need to page back and try to figure out who a character was and how they related to the story at that moment. For this reason, I'm giving it only 3 Stars.
    • 5/5
      There are many reviews of this book, and I hadn't read any of them before beginning the book -- just small snippets. Engaging book, masterfully told in a rather unusual way. The entire story is presented from the viewpoints of various characters in the book, and oddly not so often from the main character, although the reader learns much about her. Rich. Or you may be asking at the end, who was the main character? It doesn't matter.

      It's a mystery and yet not a traditional one. It's a story about people and how easily a catastrophic event can happen and then change lives in many ways, and how it connects people too. It's eloquent, to say the least. I won't summarize. If you like to read reviews, read them. I prefer going at a book cold, without someone else's opinions in the back of my thoughts.

    • 4/5
      At the center of the story is a horrible tragedy. June's house burns down in the wee hours of the morning of her daughter's wedding, and everyone in it dies: her daughter, her daughter's fiance, her ex-husband, and her boyfriend. June alone survives because she was not in the house. Everyone she loves is gone, and she does not know how to go on, how to survive. Would you? But the book isn't just about June, it is about others whose lives were also touched, and in some cases, forever changed by the tragedy. Their stories, before and after the fire, are interwoven with June's. The well written characters reflect on their lives, loves, and regrets. This was a fitting book for my last read of the year, I think. A reminder to seize the day, never let things go unsaid or undone. We can't go back and live our lives over, or change what happens.
    • 4/5
      When there's a tragedy in a novel, the question is always: how to present it. Linear? Flashbacks? In this case, the horror is buried under the reactions and responses of those affected. Too many voices are heard and the impact is muted. Including a mystery by employing the opening voice in a way that doesn't make sense until the very end of the story is an overused trope. I had lost interest by the time the story played itself out.
    • 4/5
      In the blink of an eye, June Reid's family is killed in a gas explosion on the night before her daughter's wedding (not a spoiler - the event takes place in the first pages of this novel). The book explores the effect of this tragedy on a number of people who are impacted by it. Each chapter is told by a different voice - what they knew, how they coped and how they were affected. Overall, this is an engrossing story. For the most part, the author fleshes out the characters. We learn how their own loves and losses coloured their response to the tragedy. Occasionally I was a little confused by the relationships and had to look back to get a good idea of who some of the characters were, but they came together in the end to make this an absorbing read.
    • 4/5
      Sometimes you read similar books close together and can't help but compare them. It happened to me a couple years ago when I read The Likeness and The Secret History. I enjoyed them both, but the plots were so similar. I couldn’t help but have a clear favorite. That happened again last month when I read the novels Did You Ever Have a Family and Commonwealth back-to-back without realizing how similar they are. Both books revolve around a tragedy. In one book it happens in the present and in the other it happened in the past. Both books tell the story from the point of view of many different people who are connected to the story. Both deal with grief, loss, broken marriages, and children whose relationships with their parents are beyond complicated.They were both excellent novels, but with different strengths. I read Did You Ever Have a Family first, so I think it had a clear advantage. I wasn’t comparing it to anything else while reading it. Once I started Commonwealth I kept thinking back to the plot of the first book. I think Commonwealth was the more beautifully written of the two. I love Patchett’s work. She creates such incredible characters with depth and complex feelings.Clegg’s novel is centered on the events that happen the night before a wedding. The bride and groom and other family members are killed when a gas explosion destroys their house. The mother-of-the-bride is the only one to survive. We are narrowed in to see the repercussions of one event. We flash back to the past for some context, but the main focus is the ripple effect of the explosion.In Commonwealth the tragedy isn't revealed until you’re immersed in the novel. It’s less about one big event and more about relationships. An affair kicks off the novel and the main focus is the interactions between two sets of siblings after their parents marry. We get to know the characters through decades of their lives, winding through marriages and deaths, cross-country moves and crappy jobs. Both are excellent character studies full of regret abandon dreams, sickness, guilt, and all the messiness of life. I love that two very different authors can craft completely unique books that feel similar because of the themes. BOTTOM LINE: I really enjoyed both novels, but they are unintentionally tied together in my mind.
    • 4/5
      It's a good book, quite well-written. Given the premise, I anticipated melodrama, and I think Clegg did a great job of steering away from that. If I have a complaint, it's that there are too many viewpoint characters for such a slim volume -- I would rather have seen Clegg really explore two or three characters than simply touching on so many.
    • 5/5
      An intricate story told from many points of view about a troubled family over many years. The crucial event is the explosion of a gas stove that kills several people.This is not that long of a book but the characters are extremely well developed with each one being unique enough to have a novel solely about them. This is a National Book Award nominee which I fully support. Mr.Clegg an author to be reckoned with and I feel sure we will being hearing about him with future plaudits.
    • 3/5
      This book didn't work for me. It recounts the aftermath of a tragic house explosion which left behind a single family member. The book is organized in chapters by character. Unfortunately some of the characters were not very memorable, and there were too many to keep straight. The book also had a lot of drug use which made me enjoy it even less. Having recently returned from a trip to the Pacific Northwest, I could picture much of the setting of the novel, but place was not a strong element in the novel. Perhaps if it had been, particularly in a novel whose title implies "family" which one often associates with a place, I would have enjoyed it more. It was just a bit too "all over the place" for my taste.
    • 3/5
      This novel might be better read in one sitting. Reading it as I did over several evenings didn't work very well. There are too many characters, each adding bits to the story over just a few pages. I got a bit confused and a bit bored trying to remember who the lesser characters were. Oddly enough, one of my very favorite books, Olive Kitteridge, is told by many characters, but in short stories that become the novel. Did You Ever Have a Family's sections are not really stories in themselves, more fragments of the different characters' thoughts. The core of the book is a large nugget of truth about the impact of a tragedy upon many lives, but author Bill Clegg dances around that core to the point where it becomes a bit disjointed.
    • 4/5
      This is a moving and beautifully written story of a tragedy's aftermath and the many odd threads that connect the people involved. When her daughter, ex-husband, lover and her daughter's fiancé die in a house explosion, June Reid flees to the west coast and lives anonymously in a tiny seaside motel. Luke, her much younger lover, is blamed for the explosion because of his past drug conviction, and the small Connecticut townspeople shun and slut-shame Luke's mother Lydia.Like so many contemporary novels, it is told in a time-fractured way that was difficult for me because of the extreme stress I've been under. But while I sometimes had trouble remembering connections, especially since I could only read the book in snippets, the individual chapters were vivid, clear, and humane. It calls on the reader to understand and to forgive the characters for their weaknesses and bad decisions, to mourn their loss, and to root for their reclamation.
    • 4/5
      This remarkable novel starts with a tragedy: a family is killed in a house fire. Except for June. June wasn't in the house. June, who should have been in the house.This is a story of family, with all their loves and disappointments and pain. It is told from the point of view of quite a few different characters, sometimes in first person, some in third. It was hard for me to keep track sometimes. Who the heck is George? Where does Dale come into the story. But it all sorts itself out in the end.These characters made me love them. They had depth and I cared what happened to them. All had good in their lives, all had bad, and there were plenty of secrets to go around. There were mistakes that can never be rectified, and mistakes that can be forgiven. There is a mystery – how did that fire really get started, and who was responsible? But this isn't about the mystery as much as it is about the characters.The last few pages of the book, told by Cissy, were truly beautiful. This is a terrific book for anyone who likes reading about family, and the muddle we sometimes make of family.
    • 4/5
      Did You Ever Have a Family by Bill Clegg is a difficult book to sum up without becoming too simplistic. A book about family, about interpersonal relations, about life with its highs and lows. These are true, but still don't capture the essence of the book. Rather than get into a lot of detail, I'll just mention what, in general, made this work for me.We are all told that a good book has a beginning, a middle and an end. We have become accustomed to endings that bring all of the conflicts to a solution. We also expect the story to move along, to have things happening and to then have more things happen. This novel doesn't follow all of these things in the way that most books do. That, for me, is a positive. I had the same problem some readers had, it tended to move slowly, until I changed how I was reading it. In life, most of us ponder things to death. People, comments, situations, what should or should not have been said. I shifted my reading of this novel to the same type of mindset and it worked for me. Pondering the different viewpoints from the various characters, deciding what I believed as more or less accurate while not actually calling any of them a liar. In other words, instead of having the novel do most of the work while I just put pieces together I did most of the work. The novelist, on the other hand, must have done a great deal of work to create a novel that would make me do that much work, and I thank him for it.I would recommend this to readers who enjoy taking on a larger portion of the work in the novel/reader dynamic. This is not a quick-moving plot so those who don't enjoy multiple narrators and a slow developing plot may not enjoy this as much. This is definitely not everyone's cup of tea, but those who enjoy it will likely remember it for a long time.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
    • 5/5
      This was a really great book. It is kicked off by a terrible tragedy, but the rest of it is beautiful. I loved how the story is woven through many different points of view, even through people who are only involved in the most peripheral way. It also travels through time, revealing the entire picture one tiny piece at a time.It’s less about what actually happened to June’s family, and more about how people handle grief, revelation, and forgiveness. It’s full of tiny pieces of kindness, things, like a thermos of soup, that shouldn’t make a difference but actually do.I feel like I should say so much more, but I read it a few months ago and it’s not as fresh in my mind as it was. But it’s definitely a book I would recommend to anyone. Perhaps my favorite this year.
    • 3/5
      This is a story of loss and regret. It hooked me in, even though it felt like I was sitting on its edges observing. At first I struggled with some of the voices Clegg gave his characters. Those speaking in the first person felt clichéd initially, until the story was more established, and with it their personalities. Clegg was stronger when writing in the third person. There was something about the first person speakers that made it seem they were being interviewed for an article or news report. Even the observed characters felt remote and incomplete at times. Although I felt more involved in their stories, I still felt like an observer, only seeing what was on the surface, not necessarily the truth. I don't know whether I liked this book. It gripped me, but not in the best way.