Bookreporter.com - HOUSE RULES: A Memoir by Rachel Sontag

HOUSE RULES: A Memoir
Rachel Sontag
Ecco
Memoir
ISBN: 9780061341229

There is no question that a parent physically harming his or her child constitutes abuse. It is trickier, however, to identify emotional harm. At what point do hurtful words become abusive, and how can the parent-child relationship be mended? In her memoir, HOUSE RULES, Rachel Sontag explores these important and tough questions as she recounts the abuse she suffered growing up with an emotionally cruel father and a co-dependent mother.

At first Sontag's father, Steve, comes across as strict and quirky, concerned with respect and propriety. Over time it is apparent that he is pathological, filled with a rigid sense of order and harboring a fear, hatred or resentment of Rachel, his oldest daughter (all the while managing to virtually ignore his youngest, Jenny). Steve was known to most people as a dedicated, socially concerned physician, a mentor to young doctors, a religious Jew and a witty family man. Still, Rachel later learns that even close family members and friends always felt there was something off about him. Whether it was his arrogance, his inflexibility or the way he talked to his wife and daughters, those outside the family suspected something was wrong.

And something was very wrong. Steve's house rules were bizarre and mean: fingernails had to be trimmed to an exact length, time outside the home was regulated to the minute, losing your house keys meant you were not allowed in the house for hours (rainstorms not withstanding) and phone calls were recorded. Rachel was often forced to repeat back to her father statements like “I'm a selfish, rotten, worthless, brat” or “I am the scum of the earth.” He told her he wished she had never been born.

Rachel found little solace in her relationship with her mother, a woman who allowed her husband to medicate her with lithium to keep her docile. She would ask her daughters not to upset their father and take his side when he berated or punished them for the smallest infraction. She would occasionally fly into rages and end up in fistfights with Rachel.

Rachel, who both sought out her father’s anger and wanted desperately to avoid it, escaped first to a halfway house and later to a Washington, DC internship and college. She has no relationship with her father now, and her relationships with her mother and sister are strained. In HOUSE RULES she wrestles with being her father’s daughter and what that has meant in relationships with others and her own self-image. She is afraid of becoming like her dependent and fearful mother and her overbearing father. Yet, she sometimes seems proud of the fact that she is like her father and, like many children abused or not, strives to elicit positive recognition from him. Some of what he does is clearly abusive, but some of it is harder to define. What is important, really, is the total family dynamic and how the Sontags were unable to function as a healthy unit. Her tale is frightening, honest and thought provoking.

At times it doesn't feel like Rachel Sontag has had enough distance from her childhood home to really find insight. And the fact that she knows so little about her own parents’ childhoods, especially her father’s, means that the book lacks some context. Despite the inconsistencies, HOUSE RULES is well-written and compelling overall. Readers may only wish she had waited another decade or so before setting out to record the story of her childhood in order to gain a bit more perspective.

--- Reviewed by Sarah Rachel Egelman

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